Crime: Closed Circuit Television

Lord Harrison: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What further steps they will take to promote the effectiveness of closed circuit television footage in combating crime and terrorism.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, CCTV can be an important tool in the fight against crime and disorder. However, evidence shows that its potential has not been fully realised and that a national strategy is needed. The Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers are undertaking a review of CCTV and how it may be used more effectively in reducing and detecting crime and terrorism. The review's findings will be known in the autumn.

Lord Harrison: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer. Given the role that CCTV cameras play in combating terrorism and crime, and given the substantial investment in the cameras, is it not reprehensible that many of them are not well maintained or up to date, so that a clear definition of those who are photographed is not made available to the authorities at the appropriate time?
	Will my noble friend tackle the other problem of which I gave her notice regarding the courts? As I understand it, court playback systems, which are still analogue in some cases, are incapable of repeating digital photographs and video, so that we miss out on securing some criminal convictions.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that making sure that all the CCTV equipment in place is well maintained and fit for purpose is a real challenge. That is one of the reasons why we have started a review—to assist us better to understand the sort of CCTV that should be used in different circumstances. My noble friend is also right that it is important that the courts are able to take advantage of the material produced. There is no central record of systems in individual courts, but there is an ongoing programme looking at the incorporation of CCTV in evidential form. We will continue to do that with greater vigour.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, is the Minister aware that a few years ago I went as a member of an all-party group on an official visit to the Transport for London monitoring centre, which monitors cameras all over London? We were told that if a duty officer saw a crime on the monitors he would not report it. However, in a separate part of the room police officers were also operating, and we were told that if one of them saw a crime he would report it. Surely, it is important to establish that people should make an effort. Those people are watching the screens all the time, and they admitted on that day that they saw crimes but did not feel that it was their duty or responsibility to do anything about them.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I do not know what happened on the particular day that the noble Baroness referred to, but I accept what she says. I reassure the noble Baroness that our whole approach to intelligence gathering has improved and changed over the years. We are now absolutely clear that we have to work together and make sure that information is shared so that we are better able to target crime on the road. The changes that we have made with automatic number plate recognition and other matters have all come out of the understanding that intelligence gathering about what happens on the road can make a critical difference to our ability to interdict crime.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, I welcome the Minister's acknowledgement in her Answer that CCTV plays an important role in the reduction and detection of crime. Does she accept that, with high-definition cameras now available, it is important to ensure the protection of the privacy of innocent people? Is there a system of monitoring to make sure that that happens?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I welcome the statement of the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. I think that there is agreement across the House about the advantage of the proper use of CCTV. One of the benefits of undertaking the review is that we will make sure that we have the right specification for CCTV and can target it where it can be used appropriately for the detection of crime and the protection of our citizens.

Lord Campbell-Savours: My Lords, is it not interesting to observe how the civil libertarian position has moved from opposition to this technology to support? Does my noble friend not think that that might have implications for other legislation in this area?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, my noble friend leads me into dangerous territory. He can comment; I could not possibly do so. However, it is important that we are honing our ability to identify the sort of evidence that we need to make sure that the right people are being arrested; that the right people are being tried; that the right people are being convicted; and that innocent people are not improperly drawn into a situation for which they are not responsible.

Baroness Anelay of St Johns: My Lords, I concur exactly with the final sentiments of the Minister. All our thoughts today will be with the victims who suffered in the atrocities last summer and their families. We recognise the role played by CCTV in the diagnosis of what happened. Prevention is even more important. Does she agree with the Information Commissioner's conclusions that a recurring danger in the current use of poor-quality pictures is that innocent people are apprehended? If she does, will the review take particular account of the need for the use of digital technology? Is that a key part of the review? Will it look, too, at what funding is being provided to the courts to ensure that they have access to digital technology?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness that it is important for us to get the best technology. The whole point of the review is to help us better to understand the specification that we need to get the best evidence. Blurred pictures that do not accurately identify those who can be identified do not help any of us. If we have the benefit of digital photographs, particularly when ID cards are introduced, we know that they will enable us correctly to identify those who are responsible for very serious crime.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, does the Minister agree that the behaviour of football crowds was transformed in the 1990s by the introduction of closed circuit television, which is now universal throughout the game and the pioneering of which was undertaken by the Football Trust under the leadership of the late Lord Aberdare?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I do.

Railways: Network Rail

Lord Bradshaw: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether they are considering transferring some of the responsibilities of Network Rail for infrastructure maintenance and operation to train operating companies.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, any decision to transfer infrastructure maintenance and operation to train operating companies would be a matter primarily for Network Rail.

Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply. Merseyrail is a discrete network with a long franchise. The franchisee is offering to take over responsibility for track and signalling. That would result in improved performance and save £30 million over the life of the franchise. Why do the Government not use the powers that they have under the Transport Act 2005 to persuade Network Rail to make that transfer?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, the noble Lord will recognise that it is a decision for Network Rail. Merseyrail put forward an argument for taking over this area of responsibility. Network Rail was unconvinced of its case and its figures. It is not for the Government to intervene.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, will my noble friend encourage Network Rail to look sympathetically at the proposal of some community railways perhaps going through a process of vertical integration? We understand their opposition to the Merseyrail initiative, but surely there is a case for reducing costs and making those railways more cost-effective through this sort of change?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, there is no objection to the development of community rail in these terms. The issue with Merseyrail was simply that the financial case was not made out. The Government want to encourage community rail—it enables smaller lines to escape the more stringent parts of certain EU regulation that may not be appropriate to those smaller units. Proposals from community rail schemes will of course be judged on their merits.

Baroness Scott of Needham Market: My Lords, does the noble Lord accept that, given that Network Rail is a monopoly provider of this service, it is rather extraordinary that only it can decide whether to let someone else into the market? Does he agree that it looks rather odd to put the provision in the 2005 Act if the most obvious area in the country for bringing it in is turned down by Network Rail?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, we should not underestimate the successes of Network Rail in reconstructing our rail system from the horrors of the inheritance of Railtrack. We have a vastly improved performance throughout that system, and Network Rail has contributed to that. The question of whether a relatively small part of the railway should detach itself from what are widely regarded as the advantages of economies of scale effected by Network Rail has to be judged on the financial arguments.

Baroness O'Cathain: My Lords, I ask the Minister not to pay quite such wonderful compliments to Network Rail or to be so complacent. The subject of unmanned stations has been brought up in the House before, and the reality is that women do not want to travel on trains after 8 o'clock at night, but nothing is happening. Is there a timetable to make sure that there is closed circuit television in all stations, even those that are unmanned, so that if a crime is committed there might at least be some redress?

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, the issue of security in stations, particularly as it affects women and young people, has occasioned a great deal of public debate recently. The noble Baroness will recognise that there are areas in which improvements are being effected. It is not an issue to be taken lightly. She will also recognise that security on some stations is difficult to effect. It is not the case that, say, a booking clerk behind the window in an office guarantees any security. One needs additional resources for that, and of course those are expensive. The system is alert to the fact that security at stations needs to be guaranteed in order to encourage passengers.

Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, perhaps I may press the Minister a little further on his reply about economies of scale. The Merseyrail bid is backed by Serco and Netherlands Railways, which are big companies with a lot of power in the market. His answer that they do not have the power of economies of scale is absolutely wrong, and I wonder whether he would care to correct it.

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, the original proposition is that Merseyrail should be separated from Network Rail in the provision of infrastructure. It is an effective railway that has improved its performance. It has also had considerable investment from Network Rail. The issue was whether the financial plan of Merseyrail met the test of long-term benefits to the traveller, which is the sole criterion on which the railway system ought to work. The Merseyrail case had weaknesses in it. Network Rail identified those weaknesses and reached the judgment that the case had not been made out.

Incapacity Benefit Bill

Lord Morris of Manchester: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	When they will bring forward an incapacity benefit Bill.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, the Government are committed to introducing legislation in this Session to reform the incapacity benefit scheme, establishing a benefits regime supporting a return to employment while offering long-term support to those unable to work. During the consultation exercise on the Green Paper, almost 100 meetings with stakeholders were held and over 400 individual responses were received.

Lord Morris of Manchester: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. Will he please convey to our noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath my appreciation of his admirable work in this important policy area?
	Meanwhile, is it not disturbing that the odds remain so heavily stacked against people striving to end their dependency and become taxpayers, and disabled youngsters whose parents fear seeing them go from school to scrap heap? Is my noble friend aware that 30 per cent of disabled adults now live below the poverty line—higher than before the Disability Discrimination Act became law more than 10 years ago and double the figure for non-disabled adults? What further consultation is intended with disability organisations on the detail of reform, not least on the contracting-out of core benefit decision-making to private and voluntary sector providers?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his kind words about my noble friend Lord Hunt. Yes, things are heavily stacked against people striving to end dependency. The way that the welfare state interacts with people who are claiming benefits because of a disability or health condition needs to change. That is what we intend to do in the Bill. Building on the success of the Pathways to Work pilots, we need to engage people to support back into employment those who are able to work. We believe that employment is the best way out of poverty for everyone. That is one of the main reasons why we have introduced the Green Paper.
	I mentioned consultation: it has been very successful, but I stress that we are more than happy to receive further comments and views throughout the progress of the Bill through the two Houses.

Lord Addington: My Lords, can the Minister assure us that, in the consultation, the right people are getting to the first point of contact—the interviewers, in this case? Will the right level of expertise in the various fields, especially that of the disabled, be available at the initial contact? That will cut down on appeals and, ultimately, cost.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, the noble Lord touched on an important point. The initial point of contact is of enormous importance, and the advice and support given to and the discussion had with the claimant is crucial. I reassure the noble Lord that, when the Bill emerges, it will specify how work in that important area is to be carried out.

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend will know that almost 40 per cent of people on incapacity benefit have either mental health or learning disabilities. That number is growing. We are talking about depression and stress. Such disabled people would like to work—they want to work—but have often lost the will to work and suffer extreme discrimination in the labour market. Will my noble friend tell us in what way the Government may help that group, especially through the Bill, to re-enter work and rebuild their health?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, the noble Baroness is right to highlight the fact that 40 per cent of people claiming those benefits have either mental health or personality disorder problems. It will be a key part of the Bill to recognise that that growing group must be helped. It will be a key aim of our plan to review the mental health component of the personal capability assessment to ensure that it reflects the type of mental health condition prevalent today and to review how the assessment is carried out. Again, I reassure my noble friend that great thought and expertise will be directed at that area.

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope: My Lords, I want to press the Minister on the timetable for the rest of the Bill. The Government's response to the consultation will be given in June, and the Bill will be published at the end of July, but that leaves a great deal of concern in some people's minds that there will be not be enough parliamentary time to do justice to the Bill before the end of the Session. There is even talk of the Government using a carry-over Motion—inappropriately in my view—to get the work done properly. Would it not make sense to hasten slowly and wait until the next Session, so that the Bill can be done properly in a parliamentary context?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, we are determined that this should be the best possible Bill, so any parliamentary time devoted to it will obviously be crucial in that respect. All I can say is that I have been told that we will publish the Bill in this Session. The timetable for its progression can be discussed, and I am sure that the noble Lord's view that the Bill will be better if we go slowly will be discussed and thought about.

Baroness Fookes: My Lords, I declare an interest as a patron of Tomorrow's People, one of the stakeholders in the Bill. Will the Government take particular note of any recommendations made by that organisation, which has done brilliant pioneering work in helping those who have most difficulty getting into employment? Its members have, for example, taken rooms for their helpers in doctors' surgeries so that they are very much on the spot.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness that we will take note of that group. One of the features of the Green Paper that impressed me when reading all the documents was how positive and responsive organisations were to the Green Paper. It has been a genuine consultation, involving many organisations and people who have responded to the Green Paper.

Lord Ashley of Stoke: My Lords, does my noble friend recall that the Select Committee on Work and Pensions said that it would like information on how the Government proposed to get 1 million people off incapacity benefit? How have the Government responded to that request?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, the Government have responded to that in the Green Paper and will do so with the Bill. One of the very encouraging things about the Green Paper is how positively it says that, whatever disability people have, we will do everything that we can to get them back to work. That is a major commitment, and I am absolutely convinced that the Government will follow through with the passing of the Bill and its implementation thereafter.

Baroness Wilkins: My Lords, does the Minister agree that disability employment advisers are key in helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people into work and in representing them to employers? A recent survey by RNID found that 50 per cent of advisers were not deafness-aware in any way. Can the Minister give any assurance that advisers will be trained to have a better understanding of deafness and how to communicate with deaf and hard-of-hearing jobseekers?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, that is an important point, and I will ensure that the noble Baroness's views are taken into account in the further discussions that we will have.

Middle East Quartet

Lord Hylton: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What issues were discussed by the Middle East quartet at its meeting in New York on 9 May; and what conclusions were reached.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, the quartet discussed the current situation in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza including the humanitarian situation. It concluded with grave concern that no progress had been made against the three principles that it set out on 30 January and expressed serious concern about deteriorating conditions, particularly in Gaza. The quartet expressed its willingness to endorse a temporary international funding mechanism, limited in scope and duration, to ensure that assistance is delivered directly to the Palestinian people.

Lord Hylton: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her reply. She mentioned the mechanism for getting aid to the fledgling Palestinian state. Does she agree that that is urgent and must be made to work immediately? Can she confirm that people are dying for lack of medicines in hospitals and that the high level of unemployment can easily lead to destitution?

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, I wholeheartedly agree that the mechanism must be made to work and that it is urgent. One could say that the situation in Palestine is dire, as the World Bank has warned and the quartet has recognised. That is why we strongly welcome the quartet's endorsement of what, in essence, was a French and UK idea to have the international mechanism. Delivery of the assistance is the most important thing, and we are working with our EU colleagues to ensure that the mechanism is put in place as soon as possible. I know that the situation with health is extremely difficult, which is why we will focus the results of the mechanism on it.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, we welcome the decision to get immediate financial aid through as soon as possible. In the current situation, the worst possible thing would be for the Palestinian Authority to collapse into disorder, which is a really acute danger. Does the Minister not agree that it is time for the quartet to become more actively engaged in the Arab/Israeli conflict again? The quartet has stood by and, while the new Israeli Government have made positive moves towards unilateral withdrawal, we now have an extremely complicated situation between Israel and Palestine. Is it not time for the quartet to become more active in revising the road map and pushing both sides towards reopening the negotiations?

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, it would be wrong to say that the quartet has been inactive. We have had the Palestinian elections, the Israeli elections, a statement on 30 March and one this week. It is not easy to arrive at the agreements at which the quartet has arrived. It will put the mechanism in place: that is a huge step forward. I am confident that this will be a first step and that they will work together to build on that because they recognise that the situation is urgent. Of course the road map needs reinvigorating; the quartet is acutely conscious of that.

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, we are very welcoming of the quartet's initiative. Are any steps being taken to press Israel to release the levy drawn on Palestinian taxes held by Israel, which collects those taxes, estimated at about $50 million a month? That is almost equal to the sum that the quartet has agreed to release—$54 million a month—and a crucial supplement to the resources. Secondly, will the quartet address the troubling issue of further so-called facts on the ground, such as the continuing building of settlements beyond the green line in the area marked out by the wall? The day before yesterday, the Prime Minister of Lebanon—a mixed-faith democracy including many Muslims—made it clear that that was one of the most difficult factors with which he as a democratic leader has had to deal.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, the noble Baroness is right: tax revenues would be a crucial supplement to the moneys needed by the Palestinian people. We consistently urge the Israeli Government to ensure that the customs revenues reach the Palestinian people. We will continue to do so, as will the whole quartet. We are very pleased that the Israeli Government have reacted positively to the mechanism, which we hope will have a follow through.
	As the noble Baroness will know, the quartet has expressed strongly its concern about settlement expansion, the barrier et cetera. It has also welcomed Prime Minister Olmert's call for negotiations with the Palestinian people and President Abbas's movement towards the Israelis. We hope that those discussions and the pressure that the quartet will continue to put on both parties in Israel and Palestine will ensure that the facts on the ground do not impede a final settlement.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, I welcome the quartet's change of heart and its decision to go for the temporary international mechanism and the parallel funding structure which, in effect, bypasses the Hamas authority. It should also be noted that Israel has agreed in principle to the same process. In the light of that, does the noble Baroness accept the point that I urged on the noble Baroness the Lord President on Tuesday that the Gulf states have masses of money and should be encouraged to use the bypass channels as well, although of course their banks are nervous that they will lose their international business under pressure from American sanction arrangements? Nevertheless, the money is there in vast quantities, and it ought to be possible to get it to people who are now suffering shortages of water and medical supplies and soon will be starving.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right to say that it would be extremely useful if Arab countries made donations. Indeed, in its statement, the quartet invited other donors and international organisations to consider participating in such a mechanism. I know too that the EU hopes that donors from Arab countries will contribute to the mechanism.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, with the leave of the House a Statement will be repeated later today. It is entitled "The official report on the London bombings of 7 July 2005". It will be repeated by my noble friend Lady Scotland of Asthal immediately after the first debate.

Police and Justice Bill

Brought from the Commons; read a first time, and ordered to be printed.

Business of the House: Debates Today

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Amos on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the debates on the Motions in the names of the Lord Bragg and the Baroness Hayman and on the first Motion in the name of the Lord Wright of Richmond set down for today shall each be limited to 2½ hours.—(Lord Grocott.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Childcare Bill

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of another of my noble friends, Lord Adonis, on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order:
	Clauses 1 to 48 Schedule 1 Clauses 49 to 103 Schedules 2 and 3 Clauses 104 to 111.—(Lord Grocott.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Legal Services Bill: Joint Committee

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend the Leader of the House on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That it is expedient that a Joint Committee of Lords and Commons be appointed to consider and report on any draft Legal Services Bill presented to both Houses by a Minister of the Crown, and that the Committee should report on the draft Bill by 25 July 2006.—(Lord Grocott.)

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: My Lords, I do not wish to detain the House, but perhaps I may ask the Chief Whip a question about this Motion. It refers to "any draft Legal Services Bill" from which I assume that no draft legal services Bill has yet been presented. It establishes a committee that has not yet been set up, and it will require that committee to report by 25 July this year. For a committee to be established to report by 25 July on a Bill which we have not seen seems an extraordinary timetable. I do not know how comprehensive the Bill is, but it is a rather curious Motion. Perhaps the Chief Whip could enlighten me.

Lord Grocott: My Lords, the Bill is due to be published on 24 May, so the period will run from that date to 25 July. I do not disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that it always seems a short time. However, experience tells us that these committees are very popular—there is no shortage of people to take part in them and they are very effective in the two Houses—and that they report on time. I have every confidence that the talents from this House that we shall offer the Joint Committee coupled with those of the other House will do the job. We will have to suck it and see, but I am confident.

Lord Higgins: My Lords, how can the House judge whether this is an appropriate timetable, given that we have not seen the Bill?

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I suppose at some point the House is asked to assume the good faith of everyone involved, including those who carry out pre-legislative scrutiny. This Government have a splendid record—I shall repeat that in case anyone did not hear: a splendid record—of making far more Bills, far more frequently, subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. There is an element of trial and error in the development of any new system, but this should be another popular landmark along the route. I hope that we shall continue to encourage these pre-legislative Joint Scrutiny Committees.

Lord Cope of Berkeley: My Lords, we should certainly encourage pre-legislative scrutiny, but with regard to the timing, we did establish the other day, when setting up another Joint Committee, that the date given for reporting could be for an interim report if that is how the work of the committee has worked out. I take it that this will be the case here too.

Lord Grocott: My Lords, that is not quite the question I expected, I must admit. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, made representations that it was too short a period in regard to the Joint Committee on Conventions—the slightly more contentious committee, as it has turned out—and he will know that my noble friend the Leader responded by saying that if the Committee was to come back and say the timeframe was too short, something would be done about it. I am happy to say, as the noble Lord may know, that yesterday, when this Motion was debated in the Commons, my right honourable friend Jack Straw said,
	"if the Committee comes to the view that it needs more time, we can return to the House to seek an extension—it will not be my intention"—
	this is his statement as the Leader of the Commons—
	"to stand in the way of such a request from the Committee".—[Official Report, Commons, 10/5/06; col. 449.]
	So that is further evidence, should any be needed, that we are a listening government and that we are extending the period.
	On Question, Motion agreed to; and a message was ordered to be sent to the Commons to acquaint them therewith.

Arts

Lord Bragg: rose to call attention to the contribution of the arts to the economy and the well-being of society; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the National Campaign for the Arts, an independent lobbying organisation.
	Debates on the arts arrive in your Lordships' House with the regularity of the first cuckoo. They can have, I suggest, something of the same effect. They can lift the spirits; they raise the heart; we are licensed to soar above the earthbound debates which are the grit and soil of your Lordships' daily grind. Loud sing cuckoo then this morning and, judging from those noble Lords enrolled for the debate, it will be a full-throated chorus. With so much talent in prospect, I shall largely confine myself to an overview.
	The arts in this country have become a largely unacknowledged focus of new forces and powers. Like mediaeval Barons raising their standards all over the Kingdom, the cities of Glasgow, of Newcastle, the cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, the cities of Birmingham and Bristol find regeneration in the arts, rejuvenation through the arts and proclaim their loyalty and gratitude to the strength of the arts. The cities of Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh lag not an inch behind, nor do Cheltenham and Brighton. I could go on until the clock strikes 12.
	All send messages to the capital that the arts irrigate minds, bodies and estates, both inside their city walls and in the countryside around them. A town without a festival, as the song says, is like a boat without a rudder or a fish without a tail. Book festivals flourish as once did the shrines for mediaeval pilgrimages. Film festivals, dance festivals, theatre and music festivals—the Festival of Britain is now, and it is all over this land. This is not pangloss; it is provable.
	Of course, as we shall hear, there are failings, shortcomings and short commons—and there always will be until funds become infinite and artists can confess that they are satisfied. But, on the whole, to adapt the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St Paul's Cathedral, if you want to know of Britain's art, circumspici—look around. The great lure of London depends on the City and on tourism, and tourism depends on the huge and unmatched range of the arts here. The capital blooms in all four seasons.
	When I hitchhiked to London in the 1950s I could have the Tate Gallery to myself in the morning. Now it teems, it buzzes, it takes wing in the new Turner Gallery, as does the National with its own new wing. The Tate Modern is a must visit for the youth of Europe and the National Portrait Gallery shines with care and attention. The Whitechapel is about to enjoy a spectacular step change and the East End is as busy with artists as once it was with dockers. And the arts have now been accepted as an important help in therapy: the hope and help for many who are mentally ill and disabled, the consolation of sickness.
	I suspect that we will largely be talking about subsidy—a drab word but it has an illustrious history. Most of what we travel to wonder at in ancient civilisations was subsidised. Europe is a monument to the grandeur of subsidy, whose art remains long after its politics crumble away. It is also worth remembering that the arts flourished under the subsidy of private patronage and private enterprise. Shakespeare began his writing career under private patronage. It persists, and with benefits.
	Subsidy today takes us into the public realm because, to put it at its simplest, subsidies for the arts in this country are paid for by everyone in the country and therefore, logically, everyone ought to have a voice and a slice. On the whole subsidy since the Second World War, when it hit its stride, has gone towards the older and more traditional work—once upon a time called the high arts. Great work has been done. But 60 years ago, that admirable early system of subsidy slid effortlessly into the traditional class system, which it aped and, to some extent, still does. Adam Smith's "trickle down" effect was a justification when anyone was so out of order as to call for it. To some extent, trickle down has worked especially well in the past eight years, when it has been accelerated. This Government have turned the tap wider open than ever before.
	It is also true that millions of taxpayers cannot afford to go to the opera houses or do not wish to go to opera houses or dislike opera altogether, yet they have to pay for it. At the moment, our Royal Opera House is in a great period not only in performance but also in reaching out to a wider public. Yet this question has not been resolved. It is a different category of argument from that employed to justify all of us contributing to the health service. The arts are a free vote—the whips are off. We are gradually extending our reach but we cannot claim we have anywhere near herd immunisation.
	The canopy under which the arts shelter and thrive in this country is provided by the interweaving influences of radio, television and newspapers. Most people get most of their arts through radio and television. BBC and ITV, for instance, are far and away the biggest commissioners of drama in this country. There are new playwrights, new plays and new actors in droves, and works of great distinction are often the outcome, while the contribution of Radio 3 to the classical music of this country, from both the canon and the more contemporary, continues to be exemplary.
	Subsidy in this country is now entrenched. Maynard Keynes and the post-war Arts Council, formed out of CEMA, got the ship launched. The Arts Council grew in the 1950s, especially with the regional arts associations, but it was in the 1960s that a sea change began. Jennie Lee, the first Minister for the Arts, saw to that. Her actions and her attitude fired arts policy in this country with a new confidence and a new sense of purpose. I also think that by driving through the Open University, she added mightily to the general appreciation and appetite for culture in this country.
	In the 1970s and 1980s, the Arts Council was often in troubled waters, although the sums of money still crept up. There was unrest, strikes and public outcries. Then, in the 1990s, like the US cavalry, in came the National Lottery. It was and still is a very great boon. It addressed the infrastructure and enabled new centres, which are now almost invariably the pride of the places which they help sustain. It is a worrying aspect that the percentage given to the arts by the lottery is falling. Here we have something that has worked and has given a great deal to communities economically, socially and in terms of pride. The lottery should keep its promise to the arts, and in full.
	When, in the early days of this Government, I spoke on the same platform as my noble friend Lord Smith, I suggested that there was an opportunity to take forward the image and impact of the arts as dramatically as had happened under two previous Labour governments, those of Attlee and Wilson. And so I think it is proving, with no little thanks due to my noble friend and his successor in the other place, Tessa Jowell.
	Even though we know that statistics are often statistically unreliable, they must at some time claim their time to shine, so here are a few. It is estimated that exports by the creative industries contributed £11.6 billion to the balance of trade in 2003. This equated to around 4.1 per cent of all goods and services exported from the UK. KPMG has predicted a 46 per cent growth in employment and 136 per cent output growth in UK creative industries between 1995 and 2015. Spending on the arts has increased by 75 per cent since 1997, from £196 million to £412 million. Free admission to museums and galleries has opened them up as never before. It is wonderful to see places seething with interested children, drawing in front of the paintings they have been brought to see and drawing from them, one hopes, inspiration which will last a lifetime. Two-thirds of our population took part in arts activities last year. Visits to museums are up by 75 per cent since 2001 and the introduction of free admission.
	A million young people have benefited from lottery investment in the Youth Music programme, which is a joy. If you want to be truly uplifted, go to the Albert Hall for those three days of the annual national music festival from schools all over the country, all shapes and sizes and all sorts of bands and orchestras, often with instruments furnished by local councils and local businessmen. The quality of music is world-class, and indeed some of these young people beat the rest of the world in open competitions. The passion of the young players, their knowledge and education, is deeply impressive. I could go on with more statistics, but I am sure more will be forthcoming elsewhere.
	There are, as I said, shortcomings, gaps and recurring crises, and they will be addressed by others, but I believe that over the past decade the broad overall picture is positive. Yes, the arts need more investment. There is a sense that, despite all that has been done in the past eight years, we have caught up but we have not pushed forward enough. The danger is still that, because of the way the arts are interconnected with private patronage, sponsorship and the sale of tickets, even small cuts from the subsidy percentage can bring down the best constructed schemes. Surely that must not be allowed to happen. There are also fears that the Olympic project will swallow too much leisure subsidy and strip back the arts. That will not do.
	What we are getting in this country is something increasingly for everyone. We still lag behind many other countries in the money we give per capita, but nevertheless what comes out of subsidy in this country, because of the other forms of finance and our traditional and extraordinary talent pool, is at the moment a vigorous flowering, one that not only gives pleasure and delight to millions of people who live here and come here but that means we send our artists' work out from here the world over, ships of culture in the enterprising tradition of Drake.
	Finally—most importantly, I believe—the arts give people a place in which they can exercise and enjoy their imagination, that most mysterious and dynamic of faculties about which we know so little, though we all share in its oceanic embrace. Through our imaginations we can think back to the big bang, faster than the speed of light. Through our imaginations we can empathise with ancient, even alien cultures. It is imagination that will take us forward on the journey and enlarge and understand the mind, of which our neuroscientists claim we use only a fraction. It is by imagining other and finer worlds that we will claim a better future. When Einstein was asked what was the most important attribute of all, he did not say advanced mathematics. "Imagination," he replied. "Above all, imagination."
	The arts explore imagination. It is their magnet. That is why I believe our galleries are full, the hunger for the theatre grows and people want to experience the activity itself. They want their imaginations tested. Through art we can be guided into new realms of transformation, our sensations enlarged and refined, our reach extended, our brief lives multiplied. Imagine: to enable people empowered through the unleashing of imagination. That will be the completion of a true democracy, and, I believe, a salvation for our own future as a species.
	Imagination is at the heart of the matter. At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare writes:
	"And as imagination bodies forth
	The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
	Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
	A local habitation and a name".
	From the poets and artists come the languages of feeling and thought, especially the very words that describe our lives. Shakespeare again:
	"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet".
	Yet we can all be poets, because the word "rose" was formed long ago by anonymous people in a deeper past who were like us, and out of that word comes a mushrooming of images and ideas: rose-tinted, rosy cheeks, rosy prospects. Words are us. They are our greatest possession, our difference, our distinction. Our language comes—and imagination brings it—from our collective presence.
	Often it is artists who light the way. That is why to grow and be fulfilled we need and will indisputably be enriched by the arts, which in this country now, despite some ill winds, must reach out to embrace everyone. It is that possibility that is the great, the new, the unprecedented prize of our times. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Lloyd-Webber: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, for introducing this important topic and for speaking so wonderfully about music in schools, which I entirely endorse. I hope the House will forgive me if I confine myself to an area where I obviously have a particular interest, which is theatre, particularly in the West End.
	I was interested in the noble Lord's comments about the huge renaissance of the arts in the cities and the pride that cities have now in their theatres, new opera houses and centres. When one thinks of theatre, and West End theatre in particular, one thinks of Broadway and the extraordinary way in which the mayor's office in Broadway, which has far wider powers than our mayor's office, got behind Broadway and made it the centre, the reason for coming to New York. London, of course, has not been able to do that. Although there have been many initiatives by West End theatre owners and producers, it is much more difficult to get to grips with the situation in London because there is no office which has that overall power. But, interestingly, whereas in 2005 there were 11.5 million visitors to Broadway theatres, there were more than 12 million visitors to West End theatres. That is an extraordinary statistic.
	Another statistic which makes me feel very proud of what the West End has done is that commercial theatre is a net exporter to the world whereas film and television are not; they are net importers. That brings me to something in which, obviously, I am very personally interested. I have had the fortune to have had an exceptionally lucky career in musical theatre, but we are not seeing the young writers or the risks being taken in that area in the way that I would like to see. I was talking to a friend of mine, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the other day. We felt that it would be very unlikely that we would have been able to bring forward the musical, "Cats", which, others will agree, has probably changed our lives. The investment and the risk involved in something as completely different as "Cats" was in its day would probably mean that it would not be achieved today. That leads me to suggest something about which I feel very strongly. Would it be possible, without asking for subsidy, for the same tax advantages that are given to film and television to be extended to commercial theatre? If they could be, it would be of extraordinary value, not just to musical theatre but to the many who are trying to produce plays commercially. I think of the ATG Group and Bill Kenwright. An extraordinary amount of activity is going on in the West End. Such a measure would completely transform what everyone is trying to do.

The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on securing this debate and on the role that he has personally played in supporting the arts in our country.
	I wish to speak particularly about the role of the Churches in the artistic life of our land. My first and rather general point is to acknowledge that sometimes that has been a bit ambiguous. One thinks of the destruction of statues and stained glass as well as of abbeys and monasteries after the Reformation—an attitude which later was portrayed in more peaceful terms by Trollope in the person of Mr Slope. We need to acknowledge that side of it as well. Sometimes there have also been attempts to curtail artistic freedom in the name of religion. That is based on an instinct that sacred art, or that which purports to depict the sacred, is just that, sacred, and therefore has to operate within appropriate constraints. That is true but it is not a truth which needs to be pursued by violence or the threat of violence.
	The prohibition of images of God in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions did not, however, preclude a rich artistic tradition which each of those faiths has, indeed, sponsored, but the aim has always been primarily the glory of God rather than the glory of the artist him or herself. Those who paint icons in the eastern orthodox Churches to this day have to have their hands blessed first. Perhaps in the western artistic tradition we could have paid more attention to that attitude of humility. Had we done so, we might have avoided the separation of art into a rather esoteric specialist area in the life of society—the high arts, to which the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, referred—which has tended to be a feature of our own culture.
	A second and related general point is that the very separation of the arts from the sciences is problematic. Fifty years ago C P Snow warned of the emergence of two cultures in our society—the arts and the sciences. We now know that such a separation is unhelpful and, indeed, untruthful in a variety of ways, but we are still struggling to achieve a greater sense of the unity of human knowledge and endeavour. We are also left with the modern paradox of our lives being ever more dominated by science, with the scientific community itself perceived to be too much in a cultural cul-de-sac rather than being part of that venture of human imagination of which Einstein spoke, as the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, commented.
	What of the particular role of the Churches? Let me refer briefly to three areas. First, there is the stewardship of our church buildings, which is an obvious area. They, too, are works of the imagination. Around half of the grade 1 listed buildings in this country are churches. The Church of England alone has the staggering number of 4,200 grade 1 listed buildings, out of a total of just over 16,000 parish churches, and their maintenance is a huge challenge and responsibility. Many congregations and parishes manage it cheerfully, but for an increasing number the burden is becoming too great.
	For all its "high establishment" in constitutional terms, state aid in Britain for the maintenance of historic churches has lagged far behind that in most continental countries. In Scandinavia and Germany, the church tax system has fully provided for the maintenance and repair of churches. In that very secular country, France, the state bears the full cost of repair for all church buildings built before the 20th century. The emphasis on local responsibility for church maintenance has had a good side in stimulating a sense of local pride and ownership of the buildings that constitute such a major part of our built artistic heritage. They are places which the non-churchgoing poet Philip Larkin once described as,
	"serious places on serious earth".
	In the future, greater government involvement in their maintenance will surely be required. This very day, English Heritage is launching a campaign of awareness called Inspired!—I believe the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, is part of that initiative—to secure the future of historic places of worship. The valiant efforts of many parish communities need greater supplementation, as English Heritage so clearly argues in its new initiative. Significantly, the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, has contributed a powerful new poem to the launch of the campaign. It extends to all historic places of worship; there are 30 listed synagogues in this country. In addition to the work of repair and maintenance, new works of art are still regularly commissioned for our churches, and that, too, is vital to their future and to their contribution to society at large and economic life.
	Secondly, I pay tribute to the contribution that church music makes to our artistic life. Again, amid a decline in some respects, there is good news. There are still many fine church choirs, supported by the Royal School of Church Music. Other styles of music have also secured a place in church life, mirroring the music of popular culture and even that of some musicals in the West End, with all the strengths and weaknesses that result from that. Cathedrals deserve a special mention, as they are centres of excellence today to a greater degree than ever before. In my cathedral, we have three choirs of the highest standard based on boys, girls and adults respectively, with a specialist, semi-professional group of songmen supporting the boys and girls as required. We employ three excellent organists to train and lead those choirs, which take part in a wide range of services and other events. For the boys and girls concerned, their experience gives them a musical and artistic foundation for life.
	Finally, there is also the public drama that the Churches contribute to national life, which should not be underestimated. I am talking about great occasions of state and so forth. At the end of the day, art must be for the people and at the heart of national life if it is to fulfil its true purpose in society.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate and on launching it with his usual irresistible optimism and eloquence. I particularly responded to his passionate words on the power of the imagination, which I hope to be able to touch on. I remind the House of my interests as a member of the board of several arts organisations. In addition, I recently chaired a peer review of the Arts Council England and I was privileged to have the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, who is to speak later, on the team.
	I want to talk about two things; something I read and something I saw. The thing that I read was a pamphlet, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, published earlier this year by Demos, which reflects usefully on issues that came up through the peer review that I chaired. The author, John Holden, addresses a problem which has been with us for a generation. He puts it as follows in his introduction:
	"Politics has struggled to understand culture and failed to engage with it effectively. Cultural professionals have focused on satisfying the policy demands of their funders in an attempt to gain the same unquestioning support for culture that exists for health or education; but the truth is that politicians will never be able to give that support until there exists a more broadly based and better articulated democratic consensus".
	This is somewhere close to the heart of the problem articulated by my noble friend Lord Bragg. He rightly points out that we have invested hugely in the arts over the past decade, with wonderful effect. It is, of course, right that governments should want assurance that such investment represents value for money and that arts organisations should strive to prove themselves both useful and accountable. But, we have no consistent and politically sophisticated way of talking about the impact of this investment other than through the language of instrumental value—the attempt to connect art directly and measurably to social outcomes.
	My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport made a spirited attempt to move the debate forward in her 2004 essay, Government and the Value of Culture, but I do not sense that politics has yet begun to change its ways. Meanwhile, the public has moved on. As a 2004 RAND Corporation report, quoted by John Holden, puts it:
	"What draws people to the arts is not the hope that the experience will make them smarter or more self-disciplined. Instead it is the expectation that encountering a work of art can be a rewarding experience, one that offers them pleasure and emotional stimulation and meaning".
	In other words, people do not care much about instrumental value. But politicians do; hence the tendency of arts professionals and their supporters to concentrate effort on demonstrating the ability of the arts to contribute to a huge variety of other agenda in order to get and to keep the attention of their political paymasters, rather than progressing a new, more comprehensive dialogue with the public. The consequence has been frustration and confusion on all sides. John Holden puts it like this:
	"Politics finds culture difficult to define, but we also have to recognize that the language used where culture and social policy meet is maddeningly obscure, riddled with jargon, not understood by some of the people who use it, and not understood by the public at all. Terms such as social inclusion, diversity, quality of life, health, well-being and community safety sometimes have technical meanings, sometimes not, but in any event the meanings are not widely shared. There is a huge disconnect between the public's idea of culture and what it is for, and the way politics and policy talks about it".
	Overcoming that disconnect is a real challenge, but one that we must surely face. I quote John Holden again. He states:
	"Just as in other areas of public life, such as health and education, what matters most is the public's own assessment of the value that it is getting from what politicians do. Messages about spending more, increased delivery, outputs and outcomes—that is, about instrumental value—tells us nothing about what the public itself values".
	This brings me to the thing I saw, which was an elephant. Last weekend, the Sultan's Elephant came to town. Parts of central London came to a halt as the 40-foot high mechanical beast, accompanied by an almost equally gigantic puppet girl on a scooter, and a vast army of beautifully costumed retainers, made their way slowly through the streets, stopping from time to time to visit a friend or have a party. The whole enterprise was the work of the French street theatre troupe, Royal de Luxe, and it was made possible through an inspired partnership between Arts Council England, the Mayor of London, the London International Festival of Theatre and a number of other agencies and individuals, public and private, who together found the enormous financial and operational resources needed to bring this extraordinary event to London. The brilliant way that it was achieved augurs well for our ability to put on a good show come 2012.
	I spent a large part of last Friday in the elephant's company along with an amazingly disparate crowd of others, and I can honestly say that it was one of the most uplifting, joyous, life-enhancing days I have ever spent. Why? I can put it no better than Lyn Gardner, writing in The Guardian, who said:
	"This is a show that disrupts the spectacle of everyday life and transforms the city from an impersonal place of work and business to a place of play and community. It does something very simple and important; it makes you feel incredibly happy and gives you permission to let your imagination take flight. It turns us all into beautiful dreamers with silly grins on our faces".
	Upwards of a million people turned out to see the elephant and its entourage over a four-day period and many of them have testified to the power of the event. But, although it is wonderful to know that statistic, no amount of statistical analysis will capture the value of the elephant's visit or why it will be remembered, and there will be no way of demonstrating any direct causal relationship between it and economic, social or educational outputs. So what were all these people responding to? I think they were recognising that art, like cuckoos and spring, makes you feel better just by being itself. This is what the public value. This is what political discourse about the arts must once again learn to embrace.

Lord Howarth of Newport: My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Bragg vividly reminded us, there is a huge amount to celebrate about the state of the arts in Britain, the quality of public support for them and their benign impact on the economy and social well-being. Let us take the case of music. It is fair to say that for too long public support for music was less than handsome. We liquidated peripatetic music teaching; we put music on the margin of the national curriculum; we drove our second violinists on to benefits; and we failed to provide a first-rate large concert hall in our capital city. Yet, defying gravity, the lark, if not the cuckoo, ascended.
	Night after night in London you can hear great music superlatively performed. I contest that for some years London has been the world's leading musical city. What could be more sublime than the Spitalfields festival in Hawksmoor's Christ Church? In August in other great cities of the world, the concert halls are silent, but in London, and in every home if people want them, thanks to the BBC and the inspired direction of Nicholas Kenyon, we have the Proms.
	The neglect, if that is what it was, has ended. Arts Council England is now spending more than £100 million on music and an additional £10 million on youth music. It is working intelligently in alliance with the educational system, the lottery, local government, the BBC and the industry. The industry itself is worth £5 billion a year. It has critical mass and momentum. The Arts Council sees itself as catalyst, investor, broker, knowledge bank, advocate and development agency, and it performs this role at a time when technology is making it possible in new ways for anyone who has the will and the talent to compose, create, perform, record and distribute. For those who really have talent, five new centres of advanced training in music will be open in 2007, with students supported by bursaries from the DfES.
	Live music now unites us not only in the locality where it is performed but nationally and internationally. The Arts Council, by supporting western European chamber music, south Asian classical music and folk and roots music, helps us in our society to express our cultural diversity, to develop mutual appreciation and influences and to move towards a new culture and new harmonies.
	The scene in architecture is brilliant in many aspects. The roll call of British architects of world distinction is impressive. Consciousness of the importance of good design is developing encouragingly among our people. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, in the short period of its existence, has become a great force for good, yet there are ways in which we could do still better. Will the Government accept the advice of the Royal Institute of British Architects to reform the private finance initiative so that the design function becomes far more influential? We know that good design over the lifetime of a building is positively an economy but, under the contracting system and the methodology that we now have with PFI, the upfront costs of good design are not accommodated. We need to ensure that good design, along with sustainability and value for money, is secured.
	The National Audit Office report on the first generation of PFI schools is an awful warning in terms of design. There is a growing body of academic evidence that well designed hospitals cause patients to fare better. The work of Dr Ulrich at University College London, for example, explains this powerfully and convincingly. I hope that my noble friend and the Government will respond to the very sensible suggestions made by the RIBA to change the procedures.
	The Government must also help us to look after old buildings. Our country houses—I mean the complete entities, including architecture, furnishings, paintings, sculptures, gardens, parks and landscapes—are among the great artistic glories of our heritage. Private owners need public support for their stewardship in the public interest, the interests of the rural economy and tourism, and in the interests of the nurturing of our sense of national identity and solidarity that the experience of visiting these great houses develops in us. Will the Government take very seriously the representations of the Historic Houses Association on trust law and historic properties maintenance relief?
	Equally, we must find more effective ways to look after our historic churches and places of worship, as the right reverend Prelate has told us. Historic places of worship teach us about our history and the artistic creativity of our society, and reinforce our sense of community incomparably. Will the Government respond to the inspired call from English Heritage to fund an affordable strategy, building on the strong foundation of the Chancellor's existing support for the VAT costs on repairs to listed buildings?
	Many of your Lordships will have been pleased to see that Marcus Binney, the founder of SAVE Britain's Heritage, was honoured in the new year honours list. Will the Government go further and heed the advice of SAVE? Will they immediately spot list the general market building at Smithfield or will they call in the application for demolition of this important building, which is due to go before the Corporation of the City of London next Tuesday? Will my noble friend give me an assurance that he will pass on this plea to Tessa Jowell and Ruth Kelly today, and may we have an answer immediately because the issue must be decided instantly?
	Will the Government also ensure that Network Rail and the developers do not demolish span 4, which is listed grade 1, at Paddington station and replace it with an office block? Will the new Secretary of State think again about the housing market renewal initiative—that Orwellian label refers to a project to bulldoze huge numbers of terraced houses in the north. Such houses are individually unpretentious in their architecture, but terraces are an aspect of the British genius for urban design and community. We should have learnt from the hideous experiences of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that that kind of cleansing—the wrecking of our heritage—rends and scars our social fabric as well. Will the Secretary of State call off the bulldozers?
	The Prime Minister is said to be concerned with his legacy. There would be no better initiative for him than to restore and re-energise his better public buildings programme. What in the end do we remember? Do we remember the rows, the gossip and the statistics? No, it is the enduring buildings and the works of art that symbolise an era.

Lord Colwyn: My Lords, our debate this morning gives me the opportunity to say a few words about jazz. Jazz is a significant contributor to the arts and the economy, although recent legislation has done nothing to help. I want jazz to prosper and grow, and to become more available to present and future generations. I want young people to be aware of and to play jazz. I want them to be shown how to handle and play a wide range of musical instruments.
	I first picked up a trumpet at the age of eight. I am still playing and declare my interest as a very mediocre but enthusiastic student of jazz. Jazz has a vigour and life of its own. It requires additional support to reach its full potential to sustain and nurture its musicians and audience, and to make a full contribution to the world of music.
	Great architecture, craftsmanship, visual art and music have always been patronised, sponsored and subsidised—and so it should be with jazz. Today jazz is played by musicians throughout the country. Many UK jazz musicians have developed international reputations and have committed their work to recordings that are bought by a worldwide audience. There is no major city in the UK without a jazz scene. Both mature musicians of established reputation and young musicians, many with great flair and originality, seek a serious audience who can understand and enjoy their music. They perform in a variety of settings, from concert halls, art centres, village halls, ballrooms and restaurants to coffee and public houses.
	Every summer, there is a profusion of jazz festivals all over the country, many attracting some of the finest jazz musicians in the world. One feature of the jazz audience is its size: some 3 million people patronise these events, with four or five times that amount expressing a definable interest in jazz. I recently attended some of the concerts at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival. The audience were predominantly much younger than I. Research shows that a typical audience has a 3:2 male to female ratio, and 70 per cent will be between 16 and 35.
	Last night in the Terrace Pavilion, in my capacity as co-chairman of the parliamentary jazz appreciation group, we hosted the second annual parliamentary jazz awards. There was live music from Leanne Carol, and members of the group, including the Deputy Prime Minister and Kenneth Clarke MP, awarded prizes to wonderful performers, writers, broadcasters, jazz club owners and educationalists. We were also delighted to welcome Sir John Dankworth, who presented the award for services to jazz. I am sure the whole House would wish to congratulate John on his recent knighthood for his services to jazz music. I thank Fran Nevrkla and PPL for their sponsorship of the parliamentary group.
	Ten years ago, jazz services made representations to the National Heritage Select Committee. Its first report on the funding of the performing and visual arts stated:
	"We do not believe that the different level of overheads in the performance of jazz and opera explains the massive discrepancy between the subsidy per member of the audience in the two forms of music; the Arts Council should look again at the funding of jazz played by British musicians".
	It is right for the state to subsidise the arts, and they should receive more support than at present if they are to be for the many and not the few. Sadly, within the arts family, jazz is seriously underfunded. It needs and deserves support as a legitimate art form with the visual arts, theatre and cinema. Our museums and art galleries are publicly financed in order to bring that art to the public. Jazz receives some public funding, but it is too little.
	In 1997–98, the Arts Council support for jazz fell from £1.9 million to £1 million. However, the situation has improved, although perhaps not relative to other art forms. I am grateful to Alan James, who gave me some up-to-date figures last night. The Arts Council has prioritised strengthening the national infrastructure for jazz, and increased core funding has focused on a number of strategic organisations. The council provided revenue funding of £1 million to jazz organisations, and further funding to organisations with some jazz connections. Grants were made to the Jazz Development Trust, the National Youth Orchestra, Tomorrow's Warriors and Serious, which set up and runs the London Jazz Festival.
	In 2003, the Arts Council introduced a single, open-access funding programme to support various organisations and individuals involved in a broad range of jazz activity, including festivals, concerts, the commissioning of new work, training and development. This seems to be much improved, but jazz is still a poor relation. In 2005–06, jazz funding was £1 million; for 2006–07, opera received £62 million. I hope that the Minister will support efforts to secure better funding for the future.
	Another restriction on the performance of jazz is the shambles created by the new licensing legislation. The Act included the "playing of recorded music" in the description of regulated entertainment, but it was changed in the transition to the new regime for existing bars, pubs, restaurants, hotels and any premises that were already licensed to sell alcohol. Those places were allowed to keep jukeboxes, or other systems for the playing of recorded sound, no matter how powerful the amplification. However, the automatic permission to have one or two live musicians in such venues, amplified or not, has ceased. That was the live performer element of the so called "two in a bar rule", which had been available in those premises as an exception from the general requirement to hold a public entertainment licence for live music since 1961. How is this possibly going to encourage jazz and jazz musicians?
	The DCMS hoped that existing bars, pubs and restaurants would seek authorisation during the changeover period by varying their licence application to include live music, which could be done for one fee. However, the new system is not straightforward. It entails public advertisement at the applicant's expense and a period for public consultation, vetting by the police, the fire authority, and on grounds of environmental health, planning and, ultimately, the approval of the licensing committee of the local authority. If objections are received, whether from local residents or other agencies, a public hearing may be required with potential knock-on costs.
	The Government were warned that the new arrangements would do nothing to promote live music and there have been many examples of the failures of the Act. I read with interest that the DCMS has confirmed Shaun Woodward as the new Minister with responsibility for alcohol and entertainment licensing, taking over from James Purnell. While the Licensing Act was a Bill, Mr Woodward was a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which published five reports during 2003 criticising live music reforms. Its reasons included risks to people's right to freedom of expression and discrimination against secular premises. In the last report, published in July 2003, the JCHR wrongly concluded that the Act covers amplified and unamplified music in the same way. The Act did not and does not treat live and recorded music equally. During the licence conversion period in 2005, bars and restaurants were automatically allowed to keep recording systems, but their automatic right to have one or two live musicians was taken away. The exemption for broadcast entertainment, which is inevitably amplified, against the potential requirement to license even one unamplified musician is another example of unequal treatment. I hope that Mr Woodward will consider and rely on his experience with human rights when overseeing the implementation of the Licensing Act in relation to musicians in future.
	To conclude, will the Minister confirm support for the jazz economy and encourage further funding wherever possible?

Baroness Warnock: My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn. I have the greatest enjoyment of and interest in jazz, but I want to confine my remarks to the crucial role of classical music to the well-being and reputation of this country. I use the term "classical music" to cover a wide field, but centrally I use it to designate music in a mainly European tradition, the performance of which requires certain formal skills that must be taught and learnt and the enjoyment of which is enhanced by some understanding of its history. In other words, I am speaking of music founded on a traditional music education.
	I am old enough to remember classical music before the Second World War, when the British were deemed the most unmusical nation in Europe, if not in the world, and when to be accepted as a serious performer in music or in dance, one had to be foreign or adopt a foreign name. In many schools, music was class singing and hymn practice. It is sad that those features have now gone, and I wish they had not.
	All that had changed by the 1950s, largely because of the discovery during the war years of the value of classical music as a source of deep and almost universal pleasure and as a reminder of civilisation. It is the civilising concept of music that, in my view, is now in danger of being lost. In the 1950s, and for 30 years thereafter, we enjoyed a golden age of serious music education. There were instrumental lessons financed by local education authorities, county or borough directors of music exercised real influence and talent was discovered at primary school and encouraged whatever a child's ability to pay. Class music, with the help of BBC radio, was imaginative and inspiring. We are largely still living on the capital accumulated in those years. Classical music cannot flourish without being built on an early start for everyone.
	In this way, it is like sport: outstanding talent must be cultivated, but the less talented must also be encouraged in the enjoyment they can get from their own efforts and their own listening. Like sport, school music also forms behaviour—although that is not its purpose, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, eloquently pointed out. At school level, music—whether classical or jazz—exercises its own civilising influence. Keen singers or players turn up when required, properly dressed and taking pride in their skills. They will not let down their co-players. There is a discipline inherent in the subject that spills over outside its confines, although that is not the point of the undertaking.
	Classical music is often thought to be elitist, exclusive and fit only for the middle classes. I can only say that it was not so during the war, nor in the golden age that followed. If one considers the phenomenon of the Proms, it does not seem to be elitist today. It is exclusive only in the sense that sport is exclusive: not everybody can reach the top. But it should not become elitist and exclusive by being pursued to a high standard in only a few specialist schools. I fear that there is some evidence that that is the way music education is going at present. I have nothing against specialist music schools, but music needs to be much more widely spread.
	The reputation of British choirs and orchestras is still very high. We still hang on, though by a thread, to the great tradition of cathedral music, for example. Some of our orchestras are the equals of the best in the world, with a well deserved reputation for being able, unlike many, to sight-read—to play new, difficult music at first sight without spending hours learning it first. This comes from a sound musical education. High standards of performance cannot come out of nothing. There is a desperate shortage of primary school teachers who are able to start children off on their musical education. I hope that the Minister will say whether there are any plans to remedy this situation, having regard to all schools, especially primary schools, not merely to specialist schools. I hope that we as a country can remedy this situation by encouraging the teaching of music to children before the high regard in which British music is held becomes simply a memory.

Lord Smith of Finsbury: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, with whose argument I entirely agree, and a privilege to take part in this debate so beautifully begun by my noble friend Lord Bragg. I should begin by declaring a number of interests, as director of Clore Leadership Programme, chairman of the Wordsworth Trust, chairman of the Donmar Warehouse theatre, member of the board of the National Theatre, a trustee of the Poetry Archive, and chairman of the London Cultural Consortium.
	On 26 October 1963, less than a month before his assassination, President John F Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst in which he said:
	"I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilisation as well".
	Those were fine words, which are applicable not only in America but here in Britain.
	Excellence in, and engagement with, the arts is one of the central pillars of a civilised society. The arts haunt the imagination; they solace the heart; they tell stories; they explain where we have come from and where we are; they speak to our minds, our hopes, our joys and sorrows, and to our souls. No further case needs to be made for investment in the arts by government. But it can and should be, because as well as doing all that, the arts happen to be able to play a hugely important role in the education of our children, in ensuring that they can fulfil their true potential. The arts happen to be able to play a role in ensuring the health and well-being of people who are struggling against illness. The arts happen to play a hugely important role in the development of our economy. They feed through into the creative sector of the economy, about which my noble friend spoke so highly in opening the debate.
	It behoves a civilised government to invest properly in the arts. The present Government have a proud record in this respect. From 1999 to 2005, the increasing investment in the arts, year by year, was one of the most important things which this Government were able to achieve. But—I am afraid that it is a big "but"—this year and next year, that progress will grind to a halt. The funding in cash terms for the Arts Council has been frozen for this two-year period. The Arts Council has managed to do some juggling to keep the show on the road, but that is a temporary solution to the problem. I very much hope that, when the Chancellor comes to think about the spending review next year, the forward progress in funding for the arts will once again be resumed, because cuts in, or freezing of, funding for further years beyond next year will be a disaster for the cultural and creative life of this country.
	The arts have shown that they can step up to the plate. When I was Secretary of State, one of the serious issues that came to my attention was the parlous condition of regional theatre in this country. Theatre after theatre was at risk of bankruptcy. They were dark for substantial periods of the year. They were forced to put on plays with the smallest possible number of actors and with the least possible artistic integrity.
	So I managed—I do not quite know how I succeeded—to obtain £25 million from the Chancellor specifically to enhance what regional theatre was able to do. That money was distributed properly and sensibly by the Arts Council, which conducted a thorough review of the needs of each theatre and put the money in. That investment in regional theatre has paid huge dividends. The life of regional theatre is now vibrant. In town after town across the country, civic pride in what their theatre is doing and able to do has increased beyond measure. The feeding-through of the actors, technicians, stage hands and lighting engineers who learn their trade in regional theatre to major national institutions and then into the creative industrial sector in film and television has once again begun.
	So the arts have shown that it is possible, with a sensible and well judged flow of investment—tiny sums of money in the great compass of government spending—to transform what is possible. Let us learn from that lesson; let us say to the Chancellor and to the Government that, as we look to the future and the next spending review period, the arts need to have not huge sums of money but regular increases in funding to ensure that they can continue to enlighten and enliven our lives and that that civilisation about which John Kennedy so brilliantly spoke can be a tribute to our nation in the way that it has been in the past.

Lord Harrison: My Lords, we have no finer champion of the arts than the noble Lord, Lord Bragg. He mentioned that one of the achievements of this Government is free entry to national museums, from which we have benefited enormously on Merseyside. My wife and I went the Lady Lever Art Gallery to see the Leonardo drawings shortly after entry was made free and we had difficulty parking the car. We repaired shortly afterwards to the local pub, which was empty. It is perhaps a measure of this Government that they fill the art galleries and empty the pubs through their wise arts policy.
	A second tangible example of an arts success story is Vocaleyes, with which I am associated. It helps poorly sighted and blind people to understand what is going on in the theatre, for instance. Resting actors are employed to whisper what is happening on stage to those who are in theatre to complement the dialogue which they hear. I am very pleased to say that it has received a substantial grant from the Treasury, with a matching grant from the Arts Council. It is extending its work to help those who are poorly sighted, or have no sight at all, to enjoy art galleries by having the paintings explained and interpreted for them. I hope later this year to mount an exhibition of the work of Vocaleyes to illustrate it to your Lordships. Its work needs to be better known,
	Today, I was on the No. 77A bus. Two American visitors asked me where the National Portrait Gallery with the Shakespeare exhibition was and where the Tate Britain was. I was able to advise them. They represented tourism to me, which is a hugely important component of the economy today. Within the tourism economy, the arts now make a major contribution. That has been recognised by the Government, but I would ask my noble friend whether they have any plan to revise and update the ground-breaking 1999 Tomorrow's Tourism which will recognise the important role tourism has in contributing to our economy.
	VisitBritain recognises that one in five international visitors visits Britain for arts and culture. Cultural tourism attracts principally those who are over 50, highly educated and—crucially—with relatively high incomes. Undoubtedly, cultural tourism will have an important role to play in the 2012 London Olympics, just as it will in Merseyside and Liverpool where we are preparing for the 2008 Liverpool European City of Culture campaign.
	In Merseyside we are very proud of towns like Liverpool and, indeed, Chester, with their famous architecture—what my noble friend Lord Bragg reported as the frozen music of art. I support the inspired campaign mentioned by my noble friend Lord Howarth and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester. But I must report a recent example of where things went wrong—when the BBC had to cancel a concert in Chester Cathedral because the cathedral could not be warmed up enough for those who were playing and those who were listening.
	I want to take the opportunity of speaking about the British Film Institute. I put down a question recently about the possible deterioration of the considerable arts heritage which is to be found at the British Film Institute—something like £1 billion would be needed to restore to pristine condition the holdings that it has there. Indeed, it has the world's largest archive of film and television and the largest library of printed material relating to film, TV and video. I hope that we are able to do something in this important area because I regard it as part of our arts heritage. Those of the 4.5 million people who had the opportunity of seeing the "Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon", whose reels were found in Blackburn in the north-west, will recognise and know that this footage of long-dead ordinary people pictured going about their lives a century ago has the extraordinary power to remind us of our own mortality—something which of course the best poetry does from time to time.
	Talking of poetry, in my library at my home in Chester, next to the poetry of Larkin, Yeats and Emily Dickinson is the poetry of the chess games of Capablanca with Alekhine and Lasker. The considerable artistry of these chess players has been little recognised in this country. It is something we need to do more about. Indeed, recently my noble friend Lord Bragg mentioned the 1851 exhibition in London. He might not have known that it held the first ever international tournament of chess in the world. Unfortunately, despite its wonderful artistic contribution, the premio tournament that takes place in Britain every year at Hastings is suffering from lack of subsidy. I ask the Minister whether an improved subsidy for chess can be encouraged in order to preserve its contribution to the arts.
	I conclude by reminding my noble friend Lord Bragg of the traditional American folk song that says:
	"The cuckoo, she's a pretty bird, She sings as she flies".
	The arts today are flying well but sometimes they just need a bit of public support and public subsidy to ensure they continue their flight.

Baroness Young of Hornsey: My Lords, I too am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, for giving us the opportunity to put before the House some of the issues that face the arts today and the impact of the arts in this country. Some of the contributions that have already been made make me want to rethink and revise what I wanted to say, which to me is the hallmark of a really good debate.
	First, I will declare my interests. I work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council of England as an adviser and consultant, as well as with the Museum of London and various other heritage organisations. I am also chair of the Nitro Theatre Company and am on the board of the South Bank Centre. As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, mentioned earlier, I was part of the peer review team for the Arts Council of England, which was so ably chaired by her.
	We have become accustomed, as many noble Lords have said, to thinking about the extent to which the arts and creative industries contribute to the economy in terms of, for example, exports and employment. I will not go into great detail on that—others have already spoken on it—but it is important to note that the significant numbers of lottery-funded landmark arts buildings built have transformed, literally, and reinvigorated the architectural landscape of this country. Much of that has led to formerly run-down areas being transformed, increasing communities' self-confidence and sense of local pride. The south bank in London, Newcastle and Gateshead and Walsall are just a few examples.
	If we look at the economic impact of major arts events, we can see that there are some results to be drawn from and learnt from. Figures are generally very impressive. For example, the Notting Hill carnival—one of the largest street festivals in Europe—has achieved a spend of more than £45 million by attendees over the three days, with 90,000 attendees from overseas and 300,000 people attending from parts of Britain outside London. The overall income was estimated at £93 million, set against costs of approximately £6 million to £10 million, and the carnival supports up to the equivalent of 3,000 full-time jobs a year. Of course it is not only London where arts festivals have a huge impact and create a buzz. Cumbria has an extensive number of arts festivals carrying on throughout the year where professional theatre, gallery spaces, outdoor spaces, church halls and community centres are all involved. Again, they encourage significant attendances from inside and outside the region.
	As well as recognising the economic benefits of developing the creative and cultural industries, many of us feel very passionately about the positive difference the arts can make to people's lives and the environments in which they live. Although I agree with much of what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, we must also remember that it is difficult to talk of the public as a homogenous entity—there are differences and fragmentations. Also, when we talk about the instrumentality in relation to the arts, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I want to draw attention to some of the benefits that have been gained for people from a number of projects with which I am familiar.
	Recently, I did some work on homelessness and the arts, and was struck by the number of people who are not only homeless but artists. They welcomed the opportunity to be thought of as artists first and homeless second. That was one of the few sources of pride and self-esteem that they could refer to. For people who are marginalised and who have suffered major disruptions in their lives, opportunities to participate are welcome, even as a member of an audience at an opera or at the theatre, or, more particularly, actively in organisations such as the Streetwise company or Cardboard Citizens as an opera singer, actor, scene-painter or prop-maker, giving enjoyment to hundreds of people. All those kinds of experience help people to rebuild their lives, to think of themselves as human beings first and homeless people or mentally ill second. It is particularly important for people who are seen as being on the absolute margins of society.
	I agree that we have to learn to develop new languages for thinking and talking about how we address the arts and the benefits that come from the arts. We need to recognise different perspectives, perceptions, experiences and ways of expressing them, rather than thinking of the arts as a monolithic set of experiences.
	Some people have expressed opposition to the focus on access, diversity and participation, but there are projects such as those that I have mentioned. The "On Spital Fields" project, the community cantata, recently won a prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society award in the education category. Everyone from nine to 90 in the Spitalfields area was involved in devising the project. In Bradford, the Connect project—a joint initiative by Alchemy and Cartright Hall—brings in new audiences and develops participatory ways to engage with the arts. All those different projects are focused on access, diversity and participation, but also excellence. It is great to see them all so happily combined.
	I reiterate a comment made earlier about the Olympics. It is important to reassure the arts sector that provision for the arts will not suffer and that the cultural aspects of the Olympics will be addressed and funded strategically. A particular concern is that some of the progress made to address the historic underfunding of black and minority ethnic artists and arts organisations will be eroded by a diversion of funding to the Olympics, so that some of us will not be able to participate.
	I very much hope that we can deliver the spectacle, fun and enlightenment that the visit of the elephant to our great city had over the weekend. It is important to stress, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, that the amount of collaboration needed to do that was extraordinary—not only to stop all the traffic but to dig up roads, put art installations around the centre of the city, and so on. It was extraordinarily effective and incredibly popular.
	I finish by saying that I hope that the Government will continue vigorously to pursue the commitment to funding, supporting and developing further our rich mix of creative resources, ensuring that diversity and risk-taking are at the centre of policy-making.

Lord Haskel: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is right. So are my noble friends Lord Bragg and Lord Smith. The arts make a contribution to the economy as well as to society. My noble friend Lord Bragg gave us some numbers. However, the creative industries face new challenges in that area—challenges that arise from some new developments. Those challenges arise under two headings: technology and globalisation.
	I say technology because, in recent years, technology has changed the way that we experience the arts. For example, we now watch films away from the cinema. As well as watching films at home by downloading them to our television or computer displays, we watch them in flight on aircraft and anywhere else we like using iPods and DVDs. Indeed, those alternative venues now account for about 85 per cent of studios' worldwide revenues.
	But there is more. Films and TV programmes have become interactive. We can see or hear commentaries and interrupt the programmes with games linked to various scenes. Much the same has happened to the music industry—both popular and classical music—about which other noble Lords have spoken. The BBC—surely one of our greatest arts institutions, as my noble friend Lord Bragg said—now broadcasts on content platforms instead of old-fashioned plain transmission. That is changing not just the economics of the arts but how society engages with the arts.
	Some in the arts fight that. They are wrong. Unless the arts take control and embrace technological change, technology will take over from creativity as the driving force. We cannot afford to lose that creativity.
	My second challenge for the arts and our economy is globalisation. Our response to globalisation is to move up the value chain. The arts—especially design—have a crucial role to play in that because it is often design that adds an extra dimension to any product or service. As you move up in value, the demands of the customer change. Products and services have more closely to match the purpose and personality of the user. There has to be purpose in the visual communication that goes with the product or service. The international market for such products and services is growing fast. So, as some jobs go to low-wage countries, they are replaced by the growing need for innovative talent and skills as we move up the value chain.
	However, we are not alone in wanting to do that; it is the ambition of every developed country and many emerging economies to do that. We must be more robust in claiming our place. How do we do that? The NESTA report last month spoke about how companies must use traditional management skills to run their creative businesses better—to better manage the risks, which the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, mentioned. Companies have to grow in size so that they can better face international competition. Creative businesses must be aware that successful companies promote creativity in all parts of their organisation, not just in the design department. Successful companies collaborate through effective networks, not only with other creative firms but with colleges, artists and designers all over the world. Design is one aspect of globalisation that need not cause us unease. Creative companies should use it.
	What can the Government do? First, they must ensure free and fair competition. Surely in a sector of our economy where design and innovation are the main factors of competitiveness, there should be no barriers to new firms bringing their talents into the market and no way in which firms that have run out of ideas can hold on. In addition, there is an important role for the Government in education and skills training to nurture the talent that we need. Also, by maintaining the lively cultural environment through their support for the arts, about which many noble Lords have spoken, the Government can encourage the creative economy.
	My noble friend Lady McIntosh is right. It is difficult to measure the impact of the arts on our economy through creativity and design, but I understand that the Department of Trade and Industry and the Treasury are working on that. Meanwhile, our role is surely to insist that there is a place for the arts both in the economy and in society.

Lord Sheldon: My Lords, I was especially pleased to hear the speech of my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury. When he was Secretary of State, he undertook to free the museums and galleries of their entrance charges. That made a notable change to how culture is looked at in this country. You can go into any museum or gallery and you do not pay anything. We have seen the numbers rise. I remember, as a boy, going to Colne museum in the north-west quite frequently. I was the only person there. You go into a museum now and there are crowds of people: you can hardly see some of the exhibits for the number of people. That is due to my noble friend Lord Smith and what he did, for which we should be extremely grateful.
	In 1975, new taxes were introduced when I was at the Treasury that would have impacted on stately homes. That would have closed a number of houses that had been an outstanding part of our national heritage. Fortunately, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was persuaded to allow the Finance Bill to exempt those properties from the high taxes that would have destroyed so much of our national heritage.
	On the subject of national heritage, I mention Stonehenge, which is now a place that people visit in large numbers. Again, as a boy, I used to go there—well, I went twice—and I was almost the only person there. That was in 1945 or 1946. But now there are so many people, expenditure is required to change the roads to allow some of these visitors to see it as it should be seen.
	Patrick Cormack in the House of Commons played a most important role in bringing the seriousness of the legislation at the time to our attention. After my period at the Treasury, I came to play a part in the All-Party Group on Arts and Heritage, of which I became president. More recently, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has been set up, and we have seen a greater acceptance of the role of the arts in our country. Funding from the DCMS for the arts did increase, but many of the further expectations are not being met. My noble friend Lord Smith referred to this, and said that this was most unfortunate. Expenditure has stalled, and we really need now to restore it. We see that our spending on culture and its consequences amounts to 0.6 per cent of our national income. Some other western European countries have much higher spending on culture; in some cases, it is more than double ours.
	The very valuable renaissance in the regions committee, of which I was a member, was set up by my noble friend Lord Smith to produce a new vision for our museums under the chairmanship of Matthew Evans, as he was then, or the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Temple Guiting, as he became, who will wind up the debate. The committee played a most important role in bringing together museum talents from all over the country, which to a large extent existed in isolation from each other. Some museums were in a deplorable state, and were brought together so that they had some regional assistance. That has been very valuable, and the noble Lords, Lord Smith and Lord Evans, played a notable part in that. As a result, many parts of the country have a system of support for these museums and galleries that was badly needed.
	The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has worked with the Arts Council to make a number of valuable additions to our buildings. One example that we have all admired is the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House, which is a delight. We have seen the better running of so many of our great galleries and museums, such as the National Gallery, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery—to name just a few. The Manchester City Art Gallery and the Lowry Centre have also seen outstanding improvements.
	I have two complaints which I need to bring to the attention of my noble friend. One is the slowing down in the increase in resources being made available. The other is that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has too wide a remit. The area it covers is so embracing that the culture part might suffer from the expenditure on sport, particularly with the coming of the Olympics. Its range of responsibilities is very wide. I know that the budget is being drawn up so that this will not happen, but anyone with experience of these arrangements will know that there will be some considerable over-runs as we approach the 2012 Olympics and the demand for money for that. There is a danger in one department having responsibilities for both the Olympics and culture. In these circumstances, the arts will be under pressure, and the necessary increases in their requirements must not suffer. As my noble friend Lord Smith has said, expenditure on the Arts Council should not be stalled. This is most serious, and it needs to be reconsidered.

Lord Young of Norwood Green: My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Bragg for securing the debate. He is a man of many parts, who makes a significant contribution to the arts. If noble Lords tuned into Radio 4 this morning, they will have heard that he was away with the fairies—in a literal, not a colloquial, sense—examining their role in myth and legend.
	I also want to thank my noble friend Lady Young—my namesake—who encouraged me to participate in the debate. It forced me to think about my first encounter with art, which was a visit as a young child to the Whitechapel Art Gallery to play around with bits of clay—not very convincingly, but I found it enjoyable. Perhaps a more fundamental influence on me was when a friend of mine took me on my first visit as a teenager to the British Museum and I was exposed to the wonders of the Egyptian department and the Elgin marbles. I found that to be a lasting influence.
	Why is art so important to us? The economic contribution has already been stressed and defined by the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, and I do not think we can underestimate that. But it is the aesthetic contribution that I want to focus on, because we know that art has the capacity to enrich people's lives, to nourish the soul, and to provoke and challenge deep-seated prejudices. I do not want to shoot the cuckoo of the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, or disagree with his overall assessment, because I think he is right, but I was interested in yesterday's Times and the remarks made by Grayson Perry—that iconoclastic, cross-dressing, award-winning potter and artist who, simply by his appearance, challenges ideas about sexual orientation. He said that he was walking through the city on his way to the Whitechapel gallery when he came across a group of skateboarders jumping off some steps. "Do you know that Tate Modern is putting up some skate ramps as part of the long weekend festival?", he asked. They looked blank. "From futurist Friday, 26 May till minimalist Monday, 29 May, they are celebrating their new displays with films, performance music, DJs and skateboarding", he enthused. He said that they were nice lads. One was from a village in Essex where he lived as a teenager, but they did not seem impressed. They seemed happier with the steps.
	I do not want to caricature all teenagers in that way, but I do think it exemplifies the challenge that we face as a society to engage all young people in art. In the 11 April edition of the Guardian, Simon Fanshawe talked about the role of the arts in education—a very important area. He said that an argument rages about the significance of the different goals of the Government's education policy; standards and league tables on the one hand, and a genuine commitment to social justice and inclusion on the other. But, he argues, it is the aesthetic outcomes that are probably as important, and that there are incontrovertible and clearly researched benefits to teaching the arts in school. He says that they do not guarantee that they improve results; their effects are on social skills, confidence and empathy. I stress the point that he makes; it is art for art's sake that makes a valuable contribution in education. We may not be able to measure it in SATs, but we know that it is vital.
	I shall quote from another equally important article in the Sunday Times on 9 October on the policy of free access to national collections. I, too, pay tribute to the introduction of free access to national collections, as the lack of such access was a deterrent. But we should not look at these institutions through rose-coloured spectacles. Interestingly, a recent examination by John Goldthorpe—a sociology fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University—which is due to be published in full next year, finds that 80 per cent of people from poorer families rarely go to museums and galleries. That should concern us. The study asked 6,000 people across Britain whether they had been to a museum, gallery or exhibition in the previous 12 months. It quotes—I hope it does not misquote—my noble friend Lord Smith as saying that the situation highlighted by Goldthorpe is very worrying and that his response was to say, "Let us redouble our efforts". I think he is right. I should say to the Minister before he replies that it is not enough simply to open up the museums and galleries if it simply reinforces the existing population of people who visit. We must encourage all of them to have an outreach strategy to engage with their communities, and I would welcome whatever the Minister has to say in that context.
	We should not look at the arts from one narrow perspective, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, warned us. She reminded us of the glorious contribution made by the Notting Hill carnival. We live in a multicultural, multiracial society, where concepts of art can be very different in different communities, and we need to ensure that we recognise this and the fact that art, as we define it, genuinely embraces everyone. The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, talked about his enthusiasm and love of jazz. These days, jazz is a narrow definition of music that engages with and embraces a whole range of other forms of music.
	I welcome an interesting development from the Arts Council called, I think, the decibel legacy—a short-term initiative that ran from May 2003 to May 2004 with the long-term aims of supporting and raising the profile of African, Caribbean and Asian artists in England. That is a very laudable objective. I believe that there are some useful legacies from that programme.
	The role of art is changing. It is being impacted on by technology in many ways, which has to be recognised in any government art strategy. My assessment of what the Government are doing is good, but there is no cause for complacency. I echo the points that noble Lords have made about the importance of ensuring that funding increases rather than declines.

Baroness Rendell of Babergh: My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Bragg has pointed out more lyrically than I can, we have all too few discussions of matters relating to the arts in your Lordships' House. I congratulate him on his timely introduction of this debate. Since what I am about to say refers almost entirely to literature, I must declare an interest as a writer of fiction.
	When my first book was published 42 years ago, publishing was still largely what someone has called "an occupation for the gentleman". Marketing was in its infancy and, as far as the gentlemen went, almost all editors were men. The women who entered the industry were in the foreign rights department and known, I am afraid, as "the rights girls". Things are very different now, with as many women editors as men and women heads of publishing houses. In the 1960s, 50,000 books were published each year in the United Kingdom. At present, the number has climbed to nearly 120,000.
	Literary festivals existed in those days, but they were very few in number. In those 42 years, book festivals have multiplied in a way that no one could have foreseen. Now, almost every county, city and town in Britain has its own festival. Recent additions are the Oxford, the Cornwall and the Daphne du Maurier festivals. Basically, they consist of an assembling of authors who talk about their books to an audience, are interviewed on stage or take part in panels and discussions, again in front of an audience.
	Those who say that the book is moribund and will soon give place to electronic alternatives, to television and film, should attend one of those festivals and see the large audiences, packed halls and queues of people waiting to have their books signed. They should feel the enormous enthusiasm that is generated and seems to be palpable in the air. Those who attend are people of all ages and both genders, including tourists from abroad in large numbers.
	The bookseller retail chains have grown enormously. Since the ending of the net book agreement, which gave publishers the right to set minimum retail prices for their books, they have been free to launch full-scale retail marketing of books in UK supermarkets, thus reaching a very wide market. If small booksellers have suffered, as they have, at least they have benefited from the literary festivals to which they supply books for sale.
	Alongside festivals has been the innovation of the book club and the reading group. A huge mushrooming has taken place in their numbers, many of them the offspring of one particular television programme. The Richard & Judy Book Club has done wonders for publishing and authors. There are now Richard & Judy book clubs all over the country and each book mentioned enjoys hugely increased sales. A case in point is that of an author who, regularly selling 30,000 copies of a new book, sold 600,000 after it was featured by Richard and Judy.
	Creative writing schools, once confined to the Arvon Foundation and postgraduate courses at universities, have also greatly increased in number. They are a popular draw for those hoping to become published authors and for people who love books and want to learn how it is done. For those who know how it is done, the literary prizes exist. Winners and those on the shortlists of the Man Booker, the Whitbread, the Orange and, recently, the Ondaatje prizes not only win considerable monetary rewards but also see their sales increase astronomically. Books which they might have expected to have modest sales mount to the top of the best sellers lists.
	So, do all those innovations contribute to the well-being of society? The argument is good: reading being contemplative and an escape, something which can be done in solitude while waiting or sleepless or bored, brings about a satisfying contentment. Reading makes you happy. It is also the cheapest of all diversions. Anyone attending a book festival or joining a reading group will be struck by the enthusiasm and excitement of those who read and passionately want to discuss with others what they have read.
	Unfortunately, as few as 3 per cent of non-English language books appear in translation in this country. Publishers say that there are reasons for this: among them, the cost of a good translator and the relatively small sales abroad of writers whose books, though possibly of great merit, fail to sell well. By contrast, British publishing retains an extremely robust export market. Literary stars from this country are translated all over the world. Ten years ago British authors were few and far between on the United States best sellers lists, but now many reach the top, including the prestigious New York Times best sellers list.
	British publishing is cash generative and enjoys steady growth. Ideas contained in books have been called the raw materials from which films, television productions and radio programmes are derived. The publishing industry leads the way in terms of a new digital future in ideas and in making sure that books in new forms can be downloaded to iPods.
	Let me end by saying something which will be a surprise to those who see the book as having no future. The export from this country of the works of British writers is currently exceeded only by that of Scotch whisky.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I join all noble Lords who have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on obtaining this debate, and in particular I congratulate him on calling attention to the contribution that the arts can make to the well-being of society. I should like to fill in one of the gaps that he mentioned might be included. I refer to a group that my noble friend Lord Young referred to as the people on the margins of society; namely, the contribution that the arts can make to the rehabilitation of offenders. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Smith, that it behoves a civilised government to invest in the arts, echoing the views reflected by the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, in 1910 that the truest test of the civilisation of any country is in the way that it treats its criminals.
	For three years, I sat as a member on the advisory board of Rethinking Crime and Punishment, under the distinguished chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater. On the use of the arts, we concluded:
	"Offenders should have opportunities to engage in artistic activities as part of the regime in prisons.
	Participation in an arts activity can have direct and indirect benefits. An increase in writing or drawing skills would be a direct benefit. Learning how to work as a team, or increasing self-confidence, as the result of taking part in an arts production would be an indirect benefit.
	Public awareness of the purpose and range of arts activity in prisons is very low and both arts providers and prisons are [very] wary of seeking to raise it, for fear of a negative response.
	Evidence of the positive impact of arts activity on offenders is not systematically collected and more studies are needed.
	The different parties involved in the arts in the criminal justice system . . . need to work more closely together to increase the range, quantity and quality of activity".
	That report was accepted by the Government. I seriously hoped that there would be a considerable result when, as with developments such as the National Offender Management Service, advances in the management of offenders took place. Here I must declare another interest: I am chairman of the Koestler Arts Trust, which every year mounts a competition for members of prisons, special hospitals and young offender institutions in 55 categories of art, ranging from the visual arts to music, needlework, matchstick model-making and writing. I hoped that there would be increased support for the role of the voluntary sector in contributing to that.
	So when last December the Government published a paper entitled Reducing Reoffending Through Skills and Employment, I looked for what mention there was of the role of the arts which we had pointed out to them in 2004. All it states is:
	"Other activities, for example music, drama and the arts, can also be a powerful means of engaging disaffected individuals with learning, bolstering self-esteem and broadening horizons".
	If that is so, I hope that there will be a consequential encouragement of the arts and the need for increased funding of these activities, as has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lady Young of Hornsey. But it has not proved as easy as that. As chairman of the Koestler Trust I then received an indication that because the outcomes of the arts competition did not equal the outcomes of tackling reoffending numbers, we might not qualify for government funding. The arts are not an end in themselves; they are a means to an end. Engagement with the arts and the encouragement of self-esteem motivates and puts people on the road to activities such as education, training and employment, which it is hoped will lead to the prevention of reoffending.
	When the Government consider all the evidence they have been given, and all the roles that the voluntary sector can adopt—which includes its track record of delivering public services and undertaking invaluable work with offenders—and when they note the rich contribution made by the arts to the rehabilitation process, I hope they will think seriously about co-ordinating the activities of the various agencies that all seem to report to different government ministries. Is this for the Home Office, the Department for Education and Skills or the Department for Culture, Media and Sport? No; judging from a letter I had yesterday from what is no longer called the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, it seems to be that department. Therefore in considering the role of the arts in contributing, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, to the "well-being of society", I ask the Minister to make every effort to encourage all ministries to enable the contribution to take its place in the rehabilitation of offenders currently in our prisons.

Lord Puttnam: My Lords, we should all be grateful to my noble friend Lord Bragg for introducing this important and, if anything, somewhat overdue debate. In the few minutes available, I should like to focus at least in part on the arts from an economic viewpoint, as well as from the perspective of their contribution to the long-term survival and even possibly success of our society. In the arts as much as elsewhere, we are living through a time of enormous change. I emphasise that because I believe sincerely that we are entering an era in which access to the arts in all their richness and diversity could be even further transformed, if only we had the vision, as it were, to seize the moment.
	Much of this transformation is being driven by the extraordinary power of digital technology, which has the capacity to enable the enormous wealth of publicly owned cultural material, particularly that which is locked up in our national moving image and sound archives, to be digitised and made freely available across the internet to any citizen who seeks access to it. The Creative Licence Archive Group, which involves the BBC, the British Film Institute, Channel 4, the Open University, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and Teachers TV, is seeking to make publicly owned material available for educational purposes in exactly this way. Such access will enable young people in particular to far better understand and appreciate the richness of our—and their—cultural heritage in ways that were quite unimaginable even a decade ago. There is a generation of young men and women, many of whom, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, reminded us in a debate in this Chamber recently, rely ever more heavily on the electronic media to connect with the world around them. We may or may not welcome and approve of these developments, but the fact remains that the digitised world is here to stay. We would be mad, quite literally mad, not to draw on its vast potential to enhance understanding and enjoyment of, among other things, the arts.
	That is not in any way to dispute the importance of experiencing the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra perform Elgar at its home in Symphony Hall, or of viewing contemporary British art at the Baltic, or of enjoying a retrospective of John Grierson's documentaries at the National Film Theatre. But if we really want to maximise the contribution made by the arts to the well-being of society, we have to recognise and promote changes in the way people can access and learn about them. In many cases, by reason of geographic distance or economic circumstance, people might not be able to afford a trip to the Symphony Hall, the Baltic, or even the NFT.
	As has been said more than once, this Government have every reason to be proud of their record in enhancing access. I am thinking most particularly of the decision in which my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury played a critical role: to abolish admission charges to English national museums and galleries. As noble Lords have heard, since the policy was introduced in 2001, visits to those museums and galleries have increased by over 70 per cent. I trust that, in his reply, the Minister will be able to reassure us that we can rely on this bold and inclusive initiative remaining in place. I do not think I would be alone in finding it difficult to understand, let alone to sympathise with, the rationale of any administration—most of all the present one—should they consider reversing this hugely successful policy in the cause of seeking candle-end savings to what used to be termed the "arts allocation".
	Far from retreating from success, I would argue that we need to take similarly bold and radical steps in relation to the digital opportunity I have just referred to. But there is yet another enormous debt that we owe to my noble friend Lord Smith, and that lies in his early recognition that the arts are making an increasing contribution to our economy. In promoting the creative industries as a crucial driver of public policy during his time as Secretary of State, he helped to secure a new and important role for the arts in an economic environment in which value was increasingly becoming realised through the exploitation of imagination as much as through the manufacture of physical goods. The very concept of the creative industries recognises that the arts, whether in the form of design, music, cinema or any number of other cultural forms, generate intellectual property in the shape of copyrights, patents and trademarks which, at their core, have substantial and ongoing economic value.
	By now the hard facts are reasonably well known, but are none the less well worth repeating: here in the UK the creative industries represent around 8 per cent of GDP and employ some 1.3 million people, over half a million of whom are here in London. They create skilled and highly desirable jobs. They give rise to the dissemination of innovative ideas and knowledge, along with an understanding of concepts which can find their application in a great number of other spheres, many of which—such as computing and engineering—have historically seemed somewhat divorced from even the notion of being cultural activities. The creative industries are also one of the few areas of the economy that have shown pretty consistent growth over the past 10 years. The developments and successes of the recent past should give us the energy and confidence to aggressively promote the arts and the creative industries as the most likely drivers of productivity, skills and—who knows?—even happiness in the global economy of the early 21st century.
	As I think we have possibly all come to realise, at their best the arts can provide each of us with that increasingly rare emotion, a sense of wonder, along with a far fuller and richer understanding of the complexity of the world that surrounds us. The arts help us to understand and respect difference. Equally, they can prove invaluable in helping to unite us through the illumination of our common experiences of birth, death, love and any number of other aspects of our daily lives.
	In conclusion, if we have learnt nothing else, surely what we have come to understand over the past 10 years is that, through their ability to exercise our imagination, as my noble friend Lord Bragg set out so eloquently when introducing the debate, the arts provide the key that allows us to unlock value, however we wish to articulate it, in an era in which creativity and innovation will be required to stimulate just about every conceivable form of human development.

Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, for initiating this debate and for his truly intellectual speech. Like the noble Lord, Lord Young, only a few hours ago I was listening to the noble Lord speak with great erudition on the subject of fairies. I think we can all agree that he is a true renaissance man.
	Despite the greatness of this country's artistic heritage and endeavours, as so many noble Lords have talked about today, the subject is somehow a poor relation in the arena of political debate. That is wrong. President Kennedy was right to say—here I am glad to say I shall quote a different remark from that used by the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury—that:
	"The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation's civilization".
	Across the centuries, the arts have thrived in this nation, gloriously surviving a Puritan interregnum. The works of creativity produced by Shakespeare, the Beatles, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Dickens, the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, Zadie Smith and Alan Bennett—whose play "The History Boys" is receiving standing ovations on Broadway at every performance as we speak—belong to us all. They help to define our nation and enhance it; they engender feelings of well-being through their very existence.
	Nowadays as well, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, there is film, television, design and electronic games. In an era in which manufacturing jobs have halved since 1997, the creative sector is the new economy. Real value nowadays is in the design, not the manufacture. Intangible assets are increasingly important. There is no difference between a pencil and a piece of music, in that their value is in the idea.
	Indeed, I would argue that the creative industries are virtually the only form of manufacturing left in this country—and yet creativity is still not given the status it deserves despite the fact that these industries are now a key economic driver. I was interested that the new Minister for creative industries, Shaun Woodward, recognised this fact on taking up his new job this week.
	Creativity needs to be nurtured from the beginning, but too low a profile is given to the arts in education. The national curriculum continues to hold up maths, history and science as the more valuable subjects. Of course they are incredibly important—we need historians and we need scientists—but we also need a better balance. Creativity is at the heart of everything we do and should be given equal time and credit. A shockingly high number of those who are our most successful artists—the ones whom I have come across, anyway—in whatever field, are those who found art a refuge. They are where they are in spite of school, not because of it. This is the wrong way around.
	It is also important to recognise that working professionally in the arts is not an easy option. We should engage artists in society in a more productive manner. We should encourage schemes that utilise under-employed artists in prisons, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, in schools and in hospitals. So we welcome the Government's Creative Partnerships scheme, which sends artists into schools to work with teachers and pupils, crucially across the whole curriculum. Ninety per cent of the teachers involved have found that this has improved their ability to help young people to reach their full potential. I cannot think of a greater endorsement than young people reaching their full potential—art contributing to the well-being of society—but funding is guaranteed only until 2008. Can the Minister reassure us that this is not a scheme that will wither on the bough because of a lack of money?
	Britain has historically recognised—returning to the words of JFK—that the arts are very close to a nation's civilisation. In 1753 the British Museum was created, the first national museum in the world. It was free of charge and its intent—a revolutionary notion for its time—was, in the words of the museum's director, Neil MacGregor,
	"to allow visitors to address through objects, both ancient and more recent, questions of contemporary politics and international relations. It was a product of the Enlightenment—a conviction that knowledge and understanding were indispensable ingredients of civil society—and the best remedies against the forces of intolerance and bigotry that lead to conflict, oppression and war".
	An institution such as the British Museum is more important than ever in our world today.
	The cultural historian Edward Said, a man I was lucky enough to meet, wrote before he recently died, in words which echo the mission of the 18th century creators of the museum, that,
	"we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together".
	Last Thursday, the British National Party greatly increased its representation peddling its warped fantasy of the return to some mythical racially pure Britain. Our national museum contributes to the debunking of this appalling misinterpretation of British history and identity, and to the understanding of the multicultural mixture we have always been and which so enriches the creative life of the nation.
	Thanks to the Government—and, in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Smith—having introduced free admission to DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries, so many more people are able to benefit from the enlightenment as well as the pleasure they offer. This in turn benefits society. I have to say in parentheses, however, that it is still the case that troves of treasure languish in basements, cupboards and locked rooms. How about loaning them out to schools and hospitals—and, indeed, even to shopping centres—in order to take art to the people?
	Like so many other noble Lords who have spoken, I welcome the increased funding the arts have received since Labour came to power. The money has, on the whole, proved to be well spent, so why have the Government frozen the Arts Council's budget for three years? If inflation is taken into account, this will mean a real-terms cut in funding from 2006–07. This has been described as a "betrayal" by a former DCMS special adviser and has been strongly criticised by, among others, the chairman of the Arts Council and the director of the Royal National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner.
	The national under Hytner has been both innovative and successful. It aspires to reflect the diversity of our culture, to encourage the creation of new work as well as staging the classics, and to broaden audiences. For the second year running there has been a £10 Travelex season, which saw 94 per cent attendance. It was a welcome attempt at providing theatre-goers with the free access offered by museums and galleries, and it has not come out of extra public subsidy. I think Nicholas Hytner is a man to whom the Government should listen, as well, of course, as the former Secretary of State we heard from earlier today.
	Our galleries are already struggling. Tate Modern—one of the most popular art galleries in the world—has been forced to beg artists such as Damien Hirst and David Hockney to donate work it can no longer afford. The National Gallery now has to rely on a private bequest it received in 1985 as its only major source of acquisition funding—a bequest given to enhance, not replace, government support.
	As well as unfreezing the Arts Council's budget there needs to be more progress on restoring the independence of the lottery distributors from government. Lottery money must not be used as a replacement for government spending as has happened in the past, with money that should have gone to the arts being spent on projects such as free fruit for schoolchildren. That is very laudable in its own right, but it should be paid for by the Government.
	We must value the arts and artists for their own sake as well as for the benefits they bring to other areas of life. The way in which the Government fund the arts, whereby money given has to tick various boxes, makes the arts industry rather target driven, which can sit uncomfortably with creative endeavour.
	As someone whose career outside politics has been in television, I cannot make a speech on the contribution of the arts without mentioning, as have the noble Lords, Lord Bragg and Lord Haskel, the contribution of broadcasting. The inspired creation of the BBC, leading to ITV and then Channel 4, has played a crucial role in sustaining and fuelling British creativity. Here, again, the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, must be congratulated on so successfully championing the cause of the arts, not only in this House but on commercial television.
	As well as nurturing the arts, these radio and television channels have provided virtually free access for all across the creative spectrum. This is very precious. At least one of the noble Lords sitting on the government Front Bench will know what I am about to say, which is that free-to-air access must be protected in the digital age and the PSB channels should not be made to pay for spectrum.
	Finally, the first chairman of what was to become the Arts Council, that great Liberal, John Maynard Keynes, who sat on these Benches—although they are rather empty today, I am afraid, as many noble Lords who wished to take part in the debate were unable to do so—described its purpose in a radio broadcast in 1946. It was,
	"to create an environment, to breed a spirit, to cultivate an opinion, to offer a stimulus to such purpose that the artist and the public can each sustain and live on the other in that union which has occasionally existed in the past at the great ages of a communal civilised life".
	I think this debate has shown that across the House we still embrace this aspiration.

Lord Luke: My Lords, I, too, add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on securing and so eloquently introducing this debate. It has been a wide-ranging debate, encompassing the diverse interests and knowledge of Members of your Lordships' House. That only goes to show the many ways in which the arts can filter into and enrich all corners of society.
	My noble friends Lord Lloyd-Webber and Lord Colwyn spoke about music from the depths of their own great experiences and achievements. What excellent examples they are of how the Members of this House so frequently contribute unrivalled expertise to our debates.
	I declare an interest as a dealer in watercolours, a picture framer and a lover of art. I therefore hope your Lordships will forgive me if I focus a few of my comments on this particular subsection of what have become known as creative industries. The House of Commons Select Committee pointed out in its report The Market for Art:
	"The state of the visual arts is a useful proxy for the health of our cultural life".
	As we have heard today, Britain currently leads Europe in the provision of services for the buying and selling of art. Our country has more than 50 per cent of the European art and antiques market share and 25.3 per cent of the global market share. It is a market made up of around 10,217 businesses—I do not know how you arrive at "around" 217—which provide employment for more than 37,000 people. The UK art market is particularly dependent on cross-border trade and, in this key respect, is the only serious local competitor to the US.
	These figures may look good, but I remind the House that the droit de suite directive was implemented by a gold-plated statutory instrument early this January. This has been described to me as "the darkest cloud on the horizon for the international competitiveness of our art market", a statement with which I concur. The Government, unfortunately, changed their mind, despite having fought hard for concessions on this issue in Europe. Through the SI, they have added considerable costs and complications which will inevitably affect, in particular, the smaller, more dynamic art businesses. Will the Minister reiterate the Government's commitment to review the impact of these measures and to think again if they are seen not to work or to threaten our art market? When does he plan to undertake the first review, and how will this be reported to Parliament?
	Figures released this March by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development place Britons at the top of the spending league for culture and recreation, averaging at 7.9 per cent of GDP more than for any other commodities and services except transport. However, UK Government spending on culture and recreation is low, at only 0.6 per cent of GDP.
	It is not an unfamiliar story. For example, the Government introduced free admission to the national museums and galleries in an aim to promote access, particularly for socially vulnerable groups. Despite being heralded as a success, there remain concerns within the industry that although visitor figures are increasing, the diversity of people is not. It is simply the same people visiting more often.
	The problem is compounded because although admission fees have been removed, the DCMS has imposed an increasing number of targets and aims regarding the numbers of children attending, the uptake of opportunities by new users and social inclusion projects, to name just a few. How can we realistically expect museums and galleries to meet targets and perform without sufficient additional funding?
	At the local government level, arts and heritage provide a powerful source of social capital, which lies at the essence of any community, through which we can promote an indispensable source of local identity and pride. In London, we have seen the success of design and regeneration projects such as the Tate Modern and the Great Court at the British Museum—both conceived under a Tory government—while the Tate's sister in Liverpool has been just as popular. Yet inevitably, at a time when grant expenditure from central government has become ever more popular, these very services are on the hit list for cuts. I am reminded of the vast collections of art that many local authorities have; either they do not allow access to them or, as one local authority recently decided to do, they sell them to raise much-needed funds. In that case, I am told the painting was a Lowry.
	Additional funding will always be problematic; that is why we on these Benches support the creation of a national acquisitions fund out of the National Lottery, to be managed by the National Heritage Memorial Fund. That would enable the acquisition of collections of national importance and works of art called in by the export reviewing committee. This issue was raised in detail by my noble friend Lord Astor in the Committee and Report stages of the National Lottery Bill but to date it lacks response from the Government. Can the Minister at least say that Her Majesty's Government are considering the proposal?
	We risk losing so much abroad as a result of the Government's inability to come up with any policy or scheme. Museums do not have the funding required to purchase major works of art or to part fund with public appeals, and "acceptance in lieu" is limited by the Treasury.
	I cannot mention the current National Lottery Bill without raising its proposals which will enable the Government to raid the lottery pot even further. If the Government had accepted my noble friend's amendments, the Arts Council and the National Heritage Memorial Fund would be getting 25 per cent of the distributions, not 13 per cent Since the formation of the lottery, both organisations have received more than £2 billion. I consider that a Conservative triumph.
	This Government, however, have siphoned off 50 per cent of the money to the Big Lottery Fund to help pay for things, however worthy, that should be sourced from general taxation. The four original core pillars—the arts, heritage, sports and charities—are inevitably losing out; they could receive nearly double under our proposals.
	I am aware of time and have only brushed the surface of a few of the different themes covered in today's debate. We have concerns regarding the downturn in the number of borrowed books and the precarious future of our public libraries unless that historic service is given the due care and attention it needs. We would like to encourage the making of films in this country and ensure that that happens through a fair tax regime, increasing lottery funding to the UK Film Council. We want to review how the licensing law changes have affected performances of live music and if they are restricting performances, we will change the arrangements.
	I believe that the arts are an integral part of all your Lordships' vision for a better quality of life for the people of this country. In an age of a more consumerist outlook, where there is demand for more choice and better quality in our public services, we must recognise that the provision of arts and culture needs to move with the times. However, as communities become ever more disparate and fragmented, the power of culture and the arts is increasingly important as a unifying force to bring people together. Vibrant arts provide social cohesion, increase both foreign and domestic tourism and are good for our culture and economy. The number of different cultures represented by our population from different cultural backgrounds makes a stimulating, interesting arts mix in this country.
	I argued that we need to focus less on access and more on excellence of provision, so people have the opportunity and reason to engage in their cultural passions, whether in galleries or in the village hall. In summary, I reiterate the words of a colleague in another place:
	"The role of government in our cultural life should be as an enabler, not a controller. Improving Britain's cultural opportunities and with it attracting engaging new, excited audiences will only come by trusting those with the passion, enthusiasm and energy in our cultural sector to innovate and perform in their own way".
	I look forward to hearing the Minister's reply.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I start with an apology. This has been such a fascinating and wide-ranging debate that in the 20 minutes allocated to me it will be quite impossible to reply to every point made. The thing that struck me most as I listened to the debate was that not a single voice was raised saying, "Investment in the arts is money not well spent". The cross-party points made by the noble Lord, Lord Luke, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, are very important, and it is good that that has happened.
	I thank my noble friend Lord Bragg, whose own contribution to the arts and the promotion of public understanding of the arts has been, and continues to be, quite outstanding. The speech he made to get this debate up and running was so inspirational that it coloured practically everyone else's contribution.
	The Government have an unparalleled commitment to supporting the arts, and, as my noble friend Lord Bragg has noted, since 1997 the arts have benefited from an over 70 per cent increase in funding in real terms to £412 million. It is a figure that bears repetition, since it has made good years of underfunding and supported a renaissance in the arts. The Arts Council has been able to use the increased grant in aid and lottery money to rebuild the arts infrastructure and to stabilise the arts sector. That has created a framework for creativity and a strong springboard for the future. My noble friend quoted many examples to illustrate this truth. He has spoken of the arts as a juggernaut, perhaps literally in the case of the spectacular Sultan's Elephant seen in London's streets last weekend, mentioned by the noble Baronesses, Lady McIntosh and Lady Young. The three of us were a small percentage of the one and a half million people who saw it.
	The Arts Council is not the only body making funding available to support the arts and drive forward our agenda. The six National Lottery distributors for the arts have awarded £2.7 billion to almost 49,000 large and small projects since the lottery began in 1994. These awards have generated a further £4 billion in partnership funding. My noble friend raised concern about the impact the 2012 Olympics could have on arts lottery funding, echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. We envisage that the arts across the capital and around the country will play a major role in the Olympic programme. To that end we have announced the formation of a culture and creativity advisory forum to advise the Government on the development of a cultural programme and how to ensure a cultural legacy across the country as a result of the Olympics. We are setting up a £35 million trust with government and lottery money to fund cultural and sporting events in initiatives across the country in the years leading up to the games. I hope my noble friends have no need to worry about this matter.
	Everyone has been unanimous in their praise of my noble friend Lord Smith's initiative in abolishing museum admission fees. As we have heard, that has been an outstanding success story. I was interested, as many noble Lords would have been, in an article in last Saturday's Daily Telegraph by the arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds. It starts:
	"Dusty, stuffy and august? Not nowadays apparently. Britain's leading museums and art galleries are temples of lust, positively throbbing with passion, and are ideal places to pick up a stranger or go for a date, according to a survey published yesterday . . . Of more than 500 people asked where they would take someone they were trying to impress on a date, 65 per cent chose a museum or gallery, 14 per cent suggested a pub".
	That is an amusing diversion, but it shows that young people are going to museums, which is a very significant point.
	As we have been told, the figure is consistent across the country. Visits to sponsored museums outside London have increased by 72 per cent since December 2001. My noble friend Lord Young asked about outreach programmes and what museums are doing to get young people and new audiences in. I have been out of touch with the museum world since I arrived here on the Front Bench, but all the major and regional museums were doing an enormous amount of outreach work for young children, so I think there is no need to worry.
	My noble friend Lord Puttnam asks if there is any possibility that the policy of free admissions might be reversed. The thought had not occurred to me. It has been such a brilliant success that it would be extraordinary if any government decided to change the policy.
	We talked about design and regeneration. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, said, Tate Modern is an extraordinary example. It generated £100 million in its first year and created an estimated 3,000 jobs, just half of which were specific to Southwark. As in this case, regeneration can be driven by good design, a point mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. Our cities have been in a spiral of decline, but there is now a change of culture.
	My noble friend Lord Rogers is very sorry not to be here, but he is in Barcelona, celebrating his wonderful airport opening there. He told me the other day that his view of the urban renaissance city—a city that is well designed, compact and well connected, where people live, work and enjoy leisure time in lively, safe and beautiful places—is enjoying a terrific renaissance. For the first time in 50 years, people have started to move back into city centres. My noble friend tells me that in 1990, although I do not actually believe this statistic, there were 90 people living in the heart of Manchester. He tells me that there are now 25,000 residents in the centre. Over the same period the population of central Liverpool has increased fourfold.
	My noble friend Lord Howarth, talking about architecture, asks whether the Government will accept the RIBA recommendations to reform PFI to embrace good building design. The Government are supporting good building design through joint sponsorship of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment by the DCMS, and the new Department for Communities and Local Government. PFI is a matter for the Chancellor, but I am sure he will look carefully at RIBA's recommendations. My noble friend also raised several points on planning, listed buildings, housing development, government policy and our built environment. We will convey these points to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Culture and to other Ministers who have responsibility in those areas.
	It is perhaps fair to say that few industries are closer to the cutting edge of change, and we recognise that this brings its own challenges. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Haskel for the insight he has brought to the debate on the need for both the arts and the creative industries to embrace technological change in a rapidly developing world. As an aside, I should say that the protection of intellectual copyright in the digital age is going to be a major challenge to the creative industries.
	My noble friend Lord Puttnam has also made a compelling case for harnessing the power of digitisation to enhance our understanding and enjoyment of the arts, and to seize the opportunity this offers to widen access to all.
	From what everyone has said, it is clear that the arts make a huge contribution to the UK economy; the facts, which have been well documented today, speak for themselves, but there is a wider picture that is more difficult to quantify. Innovative design and creative entrepreneurship are the driving force behind many of our most successful companies, including household names such as Dyson. The recent Cox review reminds us that all industries are creative. Seventy per cent of the value of a new car comes from its design and technology.
	I want to pause here and go back a few years to 1998, when I published Creative Britain, written by the noble Lord, Lord Smith. One of the things that I remember about the publication of that book was phoning up government departments to try to get some statistics on the creative economy. I got not a single statistic. A number of years later it is in the ether that 8 per cent of our gross domestic product comes from the creative industries. As an aside, it would be very interesting at some stage to look very closely at that figure, as it may be rather a low percentage.
	I have in front of me an article from the International Herald Tribune, which refers to a paper published in Washington last autumn by a think-tank entitled The Economic Value of Intellectual Property. The first paragraph of the article states:
	"The value of the ideas and innovation that the U.S. economy generates is more than $5 trillion a year, roughly 42 percent of the country's gross domestic product and far more than any other nation's GDP, a study to be released on Friday concludes.
	The total, an extrapolation based in part on new Federal Reserve data, is significantly higher than previous calculations of such intangible 'intellectual property'".
	It would be very interesting to get hold of that report and see how it compares with the UK's definition of the creative industries and whether we are perhaps undervaluing ourselves as we look at what the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, called a central part of our economy. Instinctively, I have a feeling that she may be right but we have to do quite a bit of work to validate that.
	We are a world leader in the creative industries. Nothing shows this more than the wide-ranging international recognition of our definition of the creative industries and constant referral to the creative industries mapping document. UNESCO refers to the document as,
	"the groundbreaking first such comprehensive analysis of the economic contribution of creative activities to the overall economic health of the country",
	and it has provided the basis for the creative industry policies for countries across the world. The noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, established the creative industries task force that produced the mapping document.
	I want to consider briefly some of the major industries that make up the creative industries. I shall mention a few statistics. I make absolutely no apology for that because it is the reality of the contribution of these sectors that will make the model of the creative industries move further into the consciousness of those who look after and are responsible for the finances of our country.
	The UK film market is the third biggest in the world after USA and Japan. There were 25 inward investment productions in 2005, with a UK production value of £312 million, and 62 UK co-productions with a UK spend of £91 million. It is a thriving industry helped by tax relief, which I shall come on to in relation to theatre in a moment. My noble friend Lord Harrison made a very important point about the British Film Institute, and referred particularly to its archive, which is an extraordinary national resource.
	The fashion industry makes an amazing contribution to the economy. As of 2004 there are 1,400 designer fashion businesses employing more than 110,000 people, generating £2 billion worth of exports.
	Our music industry is the market leader in Europe and the third largest in the world. The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, brilliantly positioned jazz as a very important part of that culture. We noted what he said about government funding. Similarly, the fascinating contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, on classical music has been noted. My noble friend Lady Rendell gave a wonderful insight into modern British publishing. She is absolutely right: sales of books are reaching record levels. Spending on books in Britain has increased by more than £500 million since 1993. Britons spend more than £2.6 billion a year on books.
	The theatre, too, is flourishing. I acknowledge the huge contribution that the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, has made to the London theatre. He asked whether the theatre could have the same tax advantages as the film industry. I shall discuss that with my noble friend Lord McKenzie. I am sure that he will be interested to hear what the noble Lord has to say. It is a very important point. The Arts Council has invested some £94.9 million in theatres in 2005–06. It is estimated that the economic impact of UK theatre is £2.6 billion, a very significant sum.
	My noble friend Lord Smith drew attention to what has happened in regional theatre. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Harrison for drawing Vocaleyes to our attention. That is a very important initiative.
	The theatre's enduring appeal has made a major contribution to our economy, even during difficult times for the tourist industry. My noble friend Lord Harrison asked whether there were any plans to update the strategy Tomorrow's Tourism. The DCMS is developing a new strategy for tourism in partnership with the sector. This will address the challenges and opportunities for tourism across the UK, including London 2012. My noble friend will be delighted to hear that we hope to publish the new strategy later this year.
	Creativity lies at the heart of almost all cultural and arts-based activity, and, increasingly, it lies at the centre of successful economic life in an advanced knowledge-based society. Edward de Bono said:
	"Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way".
	If we know that these creative skills are crucial now, we cannot lose the opportunity to ensure that the next generation has every opportunity to develop them. That is why we are doing so much work in schools. The importance of that point was stressed by my noble friends Lord Smith and Lord Young. Creative Partnerships has been hugely successful, operating in 36 areas of the country, and we are providing £151 million to support its work to 2008. It has started more than 4,500 projects, working closely with more than 1,000 schools and involving more than 280,000 young people to date. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, asked about future funding. I am not in a position to answer that, simply because I do not know. I will find out and write to her.
	The arts can also be a lifeline for those whose lives are in crisis. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, spoke movingly about rehabilitation in prisons and the need for the arts to operate in that environment. He asked some very searching questions, and I will personally find out the answers. I absolutely take on board the point about government departments working together to fulfil the vision that he has expressed, and I will come back to him on that as soon as possible, if I may.
	The Government firmly believe that the arts and the wider cultural sector have a unique contribution to make to the flourishing economy, community cohesion and national well-being. Noble Lords' contributions have underlined that. We have made an unprecedented level of funding available, and the Government recognise the potential of the arts for helping to achieve many of our economic and social goals. Again, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. I am incredibly sorry that I have not been able to deal with all the points made, but my 20 minutes are up. So, with thanks again to my noble friend Lord Bragg for initiating a debate that has been a highlight in my short time at the House of Lords, I sit down.

Lord Bragg: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Evans of Temple Guiting. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

London: 7 July Terrorist Attacks

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I beg leave to repeat a Statement made by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary in another place. The Statement is as follows:
	"I am today publishing the official account on the bombings in London on 7 July last year. Also today the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee into intelligence aspects of the bombings has been published, together with the Government's response.
	"I would like at the outset to pay my condolences, as the new Home Secretary, to all those who suffered in those events, and to pay tribute to the work done on these matters by my predecessor, my right honourable friend the Member for Norwich South.
	"The official account summarises what we know about the bombers and how and why they did what they did. It is not yet a complete picture, both because we have had to withhold some information for legal and security reasons, and because the police investigation is continuing and may discover more.
	"It will be for the legal process to confirm formally what happened but, as is now well known, there were four suicide attacks on 7 July, which were carried out by four British citizens—Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain. They killed 52 people, excluding the bombers, and injured over 700. The first three bombs went off almost simultaneously at 8.50 am on the Underground. The first, in a Circle Line tunnel between Liverpool Street and Aldgate stations, was carried out by Tanweer and killed seven and injured 171. The second, on the Circle Line just outside Edgware Road, was carried out by Khan, and killed six and injured 163. The third, on the Piccadilly Line between King's Cross and Russell Square, was carried out by Lindsay, and killed 26 and injured over 340.
	"Just under an hour later at 9.47, Hussain detonated the fourth device on a No. 30 bus in Tavistock Square. It killed 13 and injured over 110. It remains unclear why Hussain did not detonate his bomb at the same time as the others. It may be that he was frustrated by delays on the Underground heading north from King's Cross. However, it now appears that he bought a battery after coming out of the Underground system, which could mean that he had difficulty detonating his device earlier, but that remains speculation.
	"We now know from CCTV footage and witness statements that Khan, Tanweer and Hussain travelled down from Leeds in a hire car that morning and met up with Lindsay in Luton station car park. Further devices were found in one of the cars, which may have been for self-defence or diversion in case of interception during the journey. They do not appear to indicate a possible fifth bomber, and there is no evidence to suggest this elsewhere. The four then travelled from Luton to King's Cross, leaving at 7.40 am and arriving at 8.23 am.
	"Due to some outstanding police and Security Service work in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, the police were able publicly to confirm the identities of Tanweer and Hussain on 14 July, and Khan and Lindsay on 16 July. The key factors leading them to this were: finding credit and other cards in the names of the four at the sites, and in Khan's case his cards were found at more than one site; Hussain's family calling the police emergency hotline reporting him missing, and subsequently discovering that he had travelled to London with Khan and Tanweer; the discovery by the Security Service that Khan, and subsequently Tanweer, had been picked up on the periphery of another investigation; and the CCTV images of four men with rucksacks matching their descriptions at King's Cross and Luton; and the discovery of the two cars in Luton car park.
	"Khan, Tanweer and Hussain were all second generation British citizens of Pakistani origin from the same small area of Leeds. Lindsay was a British citizen of Jamaican origin, who had grown up in Huddersfield and moved to Aylesbury after his marriage. Khan was a well respected teaching assistant and youth worker, aged 30 at the time of the bombings; Tanweer, who was 22, had recently left university; Hussain was 18 and had just completed sixth form college; and Lindsay, who was 19, had left school and had had a series of odd jobs thereafter.
	"The account which is published today sets out what we know about their early lives and how they may have been radicalised. The picture remains incomplete at this stage but, with the partial exception of Lindsay, there is little that marks them out as particularly vulnerable to radicalisation, and little in their subsequent behaviour which could have given much indication to those around them of their intentions. It is not known whether others in the United Kingdom were involved in indoctrinating the group or helping them to plan, but Lindsay appears to have been influenced by an extremist preacher who is now serving a prison sentence. Their motivation appears to have been a mixture of anger at perceived injustices by the West against Muslims and a desire for martyrdom.
	"The account also details what we know about influence from abroad. Khan is known to have made a number of trips to Pakistan, including one in July 2003, where he is believed to have had some relevant training. Khan and Tanweer travelled together to Pakistan between November 2004 and February 2005, and they are assessed as likely to have met al-Qaeda figures during this visit.
	"There was a series of suspicious contacts from an unknown individual or individuals in Pakistan in the immediate run-up to the bombings: we do not know their content. Al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for launching the attacks, but the extent of its involvement is unclear.
	"Shortly after the second Pakistan trip, the group appear to have begun planning in earnest. They appear to have assembled the devices at 18 Alexandra Grove—a flat in another part of Leeds. As far as experts can establish, the bombs were made with ingredients that are readily commercially available, and to have required only limited expertise to assemble. The operation appears to have been self-financed and the cash raised by methods that would be extremely difficult to identify as related to terrorism or other serious criminality. Our best estimate is that it cost less than £8,000 overall.
	"The account does not address the emergency response. But I want to repeat my thanks and admiration for the bravery of so many—the police, those working on the underground, buses and trains, medical staff, fire fighters, disaster recovery teams, volunteers and ordinary people, including, perhaps especially, the survivors. The Government have separately conducted a lessons-learned exercise addressing many aspects of the emergency response and we will publish the results shortly. The London Assembly's inquiry, due to report soon, is also considering this.
	"I now turn to the Intelligence and Security Committee report. The committee is, of course, independent of government but has access to a wide range of highly classified documents. Its report assesses what was known prior to July, how the threat level and alert state systems operated, how the threat was assessed, and issues of coverage, resources and co-operation between the security and intelligence agencies and between the agencies and the police. The House will wish to give it careful consideration. The Prime Minister has presented to Parliament today the Government's response to the report, which generally welcomes its conclusions.
	"I know that the right honourable Member for Torfaen, as chairman of the committee, will speak in more detail about the report later. But I note, first, that the report sets out that the Security Service had come across two of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, on the margins of other investigations. On the basis of what was then known, the Security Service made the judgment that they were peripheral to the main investigation and there was no intelligence to suggest that they were separately interested in planning an attack against the United Kingdom. Although limited attempts were made to identify these two men, the Security Service decided to concentrate its resources on higher priorities including known plots to attack the UK. The report concludes that this decision was understandable.
	"Secondly, the report concludes that it was not unreasonable to reduce the country threat level from 'severe general' to 'substantial' in May last year on the grounds that there was no intelligence of a current credible plot to attack the UK at that time. 'Substantial' still represents a high level of threat and the report concludes that this reduction is unlikely to have altered the alertness of the responders or to have affected the chances of preventing the 7 July attacks. None the less, the committee recommends changes to the system. The Government have reviewed it and will be making changes to create a simpler, more flexible and proportionate system.
	"The report makes a number of other useful recommendations, which we have addressed in the Government's response. It also covers the issue of resourcing, which I will address in a moment. I am grateful to the committee for its thorough and constructive report.
	"What the official account and the ISC report demonstrate is the real challenge that the police and the agencies face in combating this new kind of terrorism. The bombers were ordinary British citizens with little known history of extremist views, let alone of violent intentions. At least three were apparently well integrated. Their radicalisation, to the extent that we know how and where it happened, was conducted away from places with any obvious association with extremism.
	"The willingness of these men to use suicide bombing as their method and to attack vulnerable, civilian targets—as is familiar from previous attacks—made them doubly difficult to defend against.
	"This is not a comfortable message. But it is important that we are honest about it if we are to defend ourselves against the threat effectively.
	"The key lesson—and this is at the heart of the Government's counter-terrorism strategy—is that the response needs to be collective: government, Parliament, police, agencies, local communities, faith leaders, international co-operation all playing their part; and it needs to be comprehensive.
	"We have a counter-terrorism strategy for achieving this, known as CONTEST, which aims to reduce the risk from international terrorism. As part of this strategy, we are seeking to prevent terrorism by stopping young people being indoctrinated into extremist violence. In this, we need the help of Muslim leaders and the community to fight the distortion of Islam which turns young people into terrorists. We need to take on those who incite and indoctrinate. We have taken new powers to criminalise encouragement to terrorism. We need to work together to show that democracy is the only legitimate means of changing policies and ensure that young people in all communities can see how engagement in British society can bring about change.
	"I know that my predecessor as Home Secretary led an extensive round of consultations with all sections of the Muslim community and I intend to develop this.
	"Secondly, we need an effective and adequately resourced law enforcement and intelligence effort. The ISC report suggests that we might have had a better chance of preventing the July attacks if more resources had been in place sooner. Even that would have been no guarantee in preventing this attack. The Government have put in substantially increased resources, in particular since 9/11. Further resources were provided last autumn. The Security Service is expanding as fast as its top management believes is organisationally possible.
	"The specific police budget for counter-terrorism will have grown four-fold between the financial years 2002–03 and 2007–08. We have allocated £30 million extra next year and £60 million the year after to expand Special Branch and other specialist counter-terrorism capacity outside London. Indeed, the total cross-government budget for counter-terrorism and resilience has more than doubled from less than £1 billion to over £2 billion over that period.
	"In addition, general policing makes a significant contribution to the counter terrorism effort. We will implement neighbourhood policing in all forces by April next year and expand the number of community support officers from around 6,500 to 16,000 in that period. This will improve our capacity to gather local intelligence to support the counter-terrorist effort.
	"The police and agencies have disrupted many attacks against the United Kingdom since 9/11, including three since last July. But the reality is that difficult choices have to be made between priorities in intelligence-led operations, whatever the level of resources.
	"Thirdly, we need effective international co-operation. This is a global threat. We are a long way from being the only targets. There have been appalling attacks in the United States of America, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey and Indonesia, to name but a few. We need to have the closest possible law enforcement and intelligence links with our many allies in the war against global terrorism.
	"We also need rapidly to develop European co-operation. The former Home Secretary, my right honourable friend the Member for Norwich South, made this his key priority for the United Kingdom presidency last year and achieved important concrete outcomes, including common provisions on retention of telecommunications data, which will make it more difficult for terrorists to communicate across borders to plan their crimes. I will make it a major priority of mine to develop this co-operation further.
	"These bombings were despicable attacks on ordinary people going about their normal daily business. It is a tribute to Londoners that the city recovered with such remarkable speed, and some of the victims have shown tremendous courage in rebuilding their lives. But I know that many victims, and particularly bereaved families, are still trying to find their own way to come to terms with what, for them, was a terrible personal tragedy.
	"I think it is right that we try to explain what the Government know about what happened that day, and I hope that many of the victims will find it helpful. I know that some will find it painful to relive these terrible events again and I know that some will continue to feel that there should be a public inquiry. The Minister responsible for supporting victims, my right honourable friend the Culture Secretary, has explained to me the strong views that some hold on this subject. However, my predecessor as Home Secretary explained last year why the Government had decided it was not right to hold such an inquiry—a decision with which I concur.
	"But I would like to offer some further explanation to those most directly affected. I will therefore be writing to all those who were bereaved by the 7 July attacks to offer them the chance to come to talk the issue through. I will convene a series of meetings, together with my right honourable friend the Culture Secretary, at which families will be able to ask detailed questions about the documents that have been published today. At those meetings I will be able to explain to them why I do not think a public inquiry would be the best step to take.
	"As Home Secretary, my principal duty is to protect the public. I am determined that we will learn the lessons from the official account and ISC report and strengthen our defences against the terrorist threat.
	"But international terrorism will not be defeated by the Security Service alone, the police alone or the Government alone, but only by all of us working together to defeat this threat to us all. That is something we must all work together to achieve".
	My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

Lord Kingsland: My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for reading the report of the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary. As the noble Baroness said, the Home Secretary's report to another place concerns both the official account of the bombings and the ISC report on the security dimension of those events.
	The bombings were an atrocious crime which gave rise to a human tragedy of the most shocking dimensions imaginable. The maimed, and relatives and friends of those killed and maimed, will be scarred by those events for the rest of their lives. The bombings were plainly intended as a step towards the destruction of our society, based on democracy and the rule of law, and its replacement with an authoritarian theocracy. In short, the bombers' motive was as lethal as their methods.
	Why did this happen and is there anything that we can do to prevent it happening again? The two, I need hardly remind your Lordships, are linked. We can know what to do next only if we can identify the causes.
	Essentially, we have two weapons to win this war—for, make no mistake about it, it is a war: first, to be a united nation, determined to defend our way of life, whatever our religion or ethnic origin; and, secondly, to have at our disposal first-class intelligence. But what is the relative importance of these two weapons? That is why these two reports are so important.
	Essentially, the Government conclude that this bombing was planned and executed by a few young men on their own initiative, captivated by the rhetoric of jihad and the expectation of eternity, with bombs constructed from information available on the internet; in other words, no international network and no other contributors were involved. If it is correct that the attack was purely home-grown, then the crucial matter to which we must attend is the failure to integrate young Muslims into the British way of life. That point was well made in paragraph 108 of the ISC report, which says that,
	"we remain concerned that across the whole of the counter-terrorism community the development of the home-grown threat and the radicalisation of British citizens were not fully understood or applied to strategic thinking. A common and better level of understanding of these things among all those closely involved in identifying and countering the threat against the UK, whether that be the Security Service, or the police, or other parts of Government, is critical in order to be able to counter the threat effectively and prevent attacks".
	Successfully addressing these problems will lead to at least two good consequences. First, it will reduce the number of those disaffected; and, secondly, it will increase the number of those who are prepared, for the protection of our society, to identify potential threats either to the police or directly to the intelligence services.
	Of course, good intelligence is vital too, and I, and indeed all my opposition colleagues, very much welcome this morning's statement that MI5 is now to relinquish its responsibilities for fighting organised crime and drug crime and convert those resources to confronting the threats that we are considering today.
	Do we need a full public inquiry? In matters such as this, there will always remain uncertainties. However, it is important that such uncertainties are minimised. In this case the uncertainties all concern the conduct of the four individuals before the bombing. How much does the analysis of these uncertainties contribute to the Government's conclusion about the non-existence of a plot? I raise a few of them. How, for example, did al-Qaeda get a copy of Khan's suicide video? What weight should be given to reports that Kahn and Tanweer met al-Qaeda leaders while in Pakistan; that they were connected with another terrorist bomb threat; that Khan was taped talking to known terrorists; that Tanweer was known to at least one foreign intelligence agency as a potential threat? Much will remain unknown but the question is: can we reduce those uncertainties further?
	Whatever the merits of the report by the hard-working and diligent civil servant, it will not by definition be perceived as originating from an independent source. Whatever its merits, the conclusion will always be qualified by that fact.
	What about the ISC report? We know that the vast majority of sessions were held in secret—inevitably. We do not know, however, which witnesses were cross-examined, to what extent they were cross-examined, or whether any witnesses were cross-examined on oath. The ISC report acknowledges in paragraphs 31 and 32 that it went beyond its remit to investigate in detail how the perpetrators became radicalised, or indeed, how they planned and executed the attack.
	We consider that the quality of its conclusions, and the evidence taken from those who appeared as witnesses, ought to be tested in the public arena. The right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary has fairly responded to this by saying that to have a further inquiry would absorb resources that would be better deployed on the task of intelligence; but that would be true of almost any supervisory role or of a committee of inquiry looking at a set of events that needed to be examined intimately.
	The Government have not made out the case against a further public inquiry. The noble Baroness said that there were still many imponderables and uncertainties. We know, for example, that there are three important ongoing terrorist cases, which are sub judice, to whose facts we cannot therefore refer. We know, too, that the investigations of the attempted bombings later in July are incomplete.
	The understanding of the motives of the people involved in these things are so important that they deserve further examination for everyone's sake, not least the relatives of the victims; that examination, for everyone's sake, should be in public.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister for repeating the Statement. I welcome the report. It is thorough, professional and highly insightful. The Statement poses more questions, but, first, I join the Home Secretary in offering condolences to all those who suffered during the events. I put on record our thanks to the emergency services for the way in which they carried out their tasks on that day. It is not out of place to mention here that we thank the police for the way in which they carry out their duties in protecting all our communities.
	I have not had access to the full report. When I asked for a copy at 11.30 this morning, I was told that it had not been released. My comments are therefore likely to be more general than specific. I well understand that the report does not provide a complete picture because information had to be withheld for legal and security reasons and the police investigation is continuing. It would be helpful, however, if the Home Secretary could ensure that Opposition Members with Privy Council status are briefed on Privy Council terms so that we can then decide whether a public inquiry would pick up from where the report left off.
	The Statement makes chilling reading. The shocking crimes were perpetrated by second-generation British citizens of Pakistani origin. It is disturbing that their motivation appears to have been a mixture of anger at perceived injustices by the West against Muslims. All of us, including the Muslim community, are at pains to understand the home-grown nature of the perpetrators. We should never lose sight of the fact that a large number in our diverse communities are law-abiding citizens. We need to look in some depth to see whether other factors were responsible for the actions of these young men.
	I welcome the Government's work in setting up sub-committees on tackling home-grown fundamentalism. I plead with the Minister to ensure that such sub-committees are representative of all communities—not restricted just to those perceived as being responsible for the atrocities on that day. When examining home-grown terrorism, we need to consider the pronouncements often made by responsible people in our community in this country. I refer, for example, to those who exploit the situation in the subcontinent by advocating self-determination of some states in that part of the world. Those are the breeding grounds of emotions and hatred and do nothing but damage the stability of some people in this country and the stability of communities.
	There is a temptation to ask for a public inquiry. We need to study the reports in detail. It would be premature to take a view at this time. However, there are important lessons to learn and a debate at some stage may be the right way to proceed. Perhaps the usual channels would consider it.
	We need to know whether more could have been done to stop the bombers getting through. While there is some evidence of a failure of intelligence, no single agency or individual was to blame, given the resources they had. It is easy to be wise with hindsight. We still have lingering and reasonable doubt. Are the resources—increased after the attacks—sufficient to deal with the continuing threat? Ken Livingstone said the other day that we are likely to face more attacks.
	It would be helpful if the independent monitor, my noble friend Lord Carlile of Berriew, is given the opportunity to verify this. The public may find that acceptable in the absence of a public inquiry.
	The ISC report concludes that while the bombers shared an ideology with al-Qaeda, how much, if any, practical contact they had is uncertain. It is the duty of all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity or nationality, to ensure that we participate fully in sustaining our democracy. Terror has no place in any society, nor will the community ever bow to such pressures. We must defeat terrorism and factors that give rise to it because democracy is precious and we should never allow it to be exploited by terrorism.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I welcome the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, and the response of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. A theme from all sides of the House, both in the Statement and in the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Kingsland and Lord Dholakia, is that we, as British citizens, must be united in our trenchant opposition to the acts of terror committed against the people of our country. It is right that we remember that the victims who were adversely affected by this terrible event, both the injured and those who tragically died, came from all our communities. It involved all the faiths who live in this country and the victims came in all complexions. It is therefore extremely important that the two speeches and the government response say that we should be a united country. There is a clear distinction between those of us who believe in democracy and freedom and those who do not. I welcome those sentiments.
	I understand the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, about the details and why he would suggest that a public inquiry might be preferred. However, I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, that it would be premature for us to do that. I apologise to the noble Lord for his not having the advantage of having the full report before coming to this debate and having to reply on behalf of his party. I will do all I can to ensure that he receives that report as soon as possible.
	However, we must be clear that much is known. We have been much advantaged by the information given to the Intelligence Security Committee and its report. With your Lordships' permission, I will highlight a few of the issues that it told us about. First, the committee had access to all the relevant intelligence material. I know that no one in this House questions the committee's independence. The report confirms that the Security Service came across the two individuals—subsequently identified as Kahn and Tanweer—on the peripheries of another investigation. However, there were three significant factors. First, it was only after 7 July that the service was able fully to identify the two men. Secondly, there was no intelligence at the time that they were interested in planning an attack on the United Kingdom. Thirdly, the intelligence of the time suggested that their focus was on training and insurgent operations in Pakistan, and fraud.
	It is important for us to remember the committee's assessment, which is to be found on page 16, paragraph 56. It said:
	"We conclude that, in light of the other priority investigations being conducted and the limitations on Security Service resources, the decisions not to give greater investigative priority to these two individuals were understandable".
	We have collected a volume of information. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, is as anxious as we that the real concentration must be on using our resources to protect the people of this country from further attacks. It is not insignificant that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary felt it was proper to share with the other place—and, indeed, your Lordships—that there had been a successful deflection of three further attacks since 7 July. Members of this House will know what a significant statement that was.
	The main focus must now be on the continued protection we need to keep the people of our country safe. In the Statement, my right honourable friend made clear just how much resource has now been made available—we have quadrupled in one sense, and doubled in another: £1 billion to £2 billion. It is important to remember what the security services have said. This work must be carefully managed and done at a high degree of excellence if we are receive the protection which people in this country deserve. It is clear from the recommendations that the expansion in the service is being developed as rapidly as can safely be achieved in order to keep that level of integrity.
	Of course, we must continue to look at this issue. My right honourable friend in the other place said that he would consider asking the chairman of the committee—my right honourable friend Paul Murphy—to look, with his committee, further. I know that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary will give that further attention. I commend the comments made by the noble Lords, Lord Dholakia and Lord Kingsland, because they demonstrate that politicians in this House and the other place, irrespective of party, are determined that those who would visit terror on our streets will not succeed.

Lord Lloyd of Berwick: My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. It is important because, for the first time, it identifies and correctly describes the current threat to the United Kingdom. Does the noble Baroness agree that, if the Terrorism Act 2006 had been in force at the time, it follows from what she has said that it would not have prevented the bombing on 7 July? Does she further agree that, if we are to defend ourselves against such attacks in the future, our best course is to avoid what the noble Lord, Lord Condon, described from these Benches as counter-productive legislation, since it only plays into the hands of the propagandists?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I cannot agree with the noble and learned Lord that the new legislation would have had no impact. This House debated long and hard the issues that impinge upon radicalisation. From the information we now have, it is clear that these young men, who would, for all intents and purposes appear to be ordinary, decent young men—three of them well integrated—were radicalised. The methods used to radicalise them potentially came through a plethora of sources, whether through the internet or other material. If anything, it tragically underlines how important it is to be resolute in our opposition to such radicalisation and the means through which it comes.

Lord Wright of Richmond: My Lords, I join others in thanking the Minister for repeating this important Statement. I entirely agree with one of the conclusions: that the problem is one of trying to involve Muslim youth more in this country and national society.
	However, I note that when the Minister listed various measures by which we can counter the Islamic threat, she did not refer to foreign policy. I ask her to draw the attention of her new colleague, Mrs Beckett, to the important fact that a positive, active and balanced foreign policy towards the problems of the Middle East and the misunderstandings and serious resentments of the rest of the Islamic world—which vastly outnumbers the Middle East—would do more than anything to reduce the resentments which, frankly, lie behind some of these terrible actions.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I absolutely understand the thrust of the question of the noble Lord, Lord Wright. That is why the Statement made reference to the importance of international co-operation and understanding.
	The truth is that many of the problems with which we are now jointly and severally faced have an international dimension. We must therefore all think more globally than we have hitherto been obliged to do. So things are changing, and I can assure the noble Lord that the policy that we intend to advocate and complete on this issue will be across government. That is why when I say that it will take us all, I mean every individual, every agency and every department of state.

Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: My Lords, I welcome the Statement by my noble friend. I speak as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee and I am grateful for the positive comments she has made about the ISC report and for the generous response of the Government to the report, its recommendations and its conclusions.
	I shall make two points to my noble friend. I am particularly pleased that the Government have responded so positively to our comments and recommendations on the system of threat level and alert states. We recommended greater transparency and that thought be given to what could be put into the public domain. The Government have said in their response that they have accepted that recommendation and will be doing that. I would like an assurance from the Minister that that will happen as soon as possible.
	Does the Minister agree that the cases of Khan and Tanweer provide a dramatic example of the terrible dilemmas and choices that any security service has to make? My noble friend enumerated the facts about those people. They were on the radar screen of the security service—if one wants to put it like that—but as two unidentified men among a group of unidentified men on the periphery of an ongoing investigation that had great importance for the security service. Decisions have to be made about where resources are put in following up leads, with prime priority on anything that carries a risk of loss of life. There was no intelligence to indicate that any of those on the periphery had anything to do with a threat to life in the UK. Where to put priorities is always a question for the security service. It has to put them where it has intelligence that there is a real threat to the United Kingdom. When doing that, there is no guarantee that if resources are put into a different place something equally awful would not happen because the resources had not been used somewhere else. Does the Minister not agree that these two cases illustrate the tremendously difficult job that our security service has to do and has done so well in thwarting so many attacks but, unfortunately, not the one last July?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that my noble friend made in relation to these matters and, like many others, I join her in commending the efforts that have been made. I give her the assurance that she seeks: we will seek to implement the recommendations as soon as reasonably practical. The committee rightly flagged up broader concerns about the threat levels. The Government conducted a review on this area and some of the points raised by the ISC were considered in it. We hope to be able to publish the results in the next few weeks.

Lord Tebbit: My Lords, does the noble Baroness care to remind the noble Lord, Lord Wright, that it is part of the mark of being a citizen of a civilised democracy that even if one disagrees with its foreign policy that does not entitle one to conduct terrorist activities on its citizens? Secondly, does she agree that if, as we all believe and the Statement suggests, these bombings were not of foreign origin but were entirely home grown, it underlines the necessity to pay more attention to the need to integrate fully, not merely on the surface but philosophically as well, those from minority cultures into the culture of this nation?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Wright, entirely agrees with the sentiment that the noble Lord expressed in relation to there being no entitlement to conduct terrorism. I cannot believe that the noble Lord, Lord Wright, would do anything other than agree.

Lord Wright of Richmond: Hear, hear.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, in relation to the need to integrate all members of the community so that we are a proper, fully faceted, rounded British community taking advantage of all the richness of the cultures that now make up modern Britain, I absolutely agree with the noble Lord. That its why we have undertaken a series of works to engage better with communities because is it incumbent upon all of us to remember that this threat affected the Muslim community as much as any other community. Its pain has been as acute as any because it lost people and it has been stigmatised in the same way as many others. The unity that we have been speaking about is of critical importance, and the most important thing for us to do is not to let others divide us into what is and is not now British culture.

Lord Borrie: My Lords, would the Minister care to comment, 10 months on from last July, on the attitude of representative Muslim organisations in this country to the objectives that the Government have on the integration of people who were born outside this country or those who, if born in this country, are of different ethnic groups? Does she feel that those organisations have adopted attitudes towards so-called radicalisation that are more in line with the attitude of my noble friend and the Home Secretary?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, one of the most encouraging things that we have experienced since 7/7 is the way in which all communities and, in particular, faith leaders, have come forward to express their trenchant opposition to the acts of terror that have been visited on this country. One of the most inspiring things was that immediately after the bombing of 7 July, all the leaders of the faith communities came together in a united statement and said that they were totally opposed to what had happened. That was an encouraging statement. Since then, we have seen that continued with community groups becoming more vocal in saying that those who act as terrorists do not speak for the communities of this country.

Lord King of Bridgwater: My Lords, does the Minister recognise that my noble friend Lord Kingsland has made a powerful argument for a public inquiry? One of the arguments against having a public inquiry depends on the quality and integrity of the report from the ISC as well as the Government's report. I have not yet had a chance to study them in detail. But the degree to which the ISC will command confidence and respect depends on its access to the fullest possible information that might be relevant to its inquiries. Its access will be dependent on the confidence that people have that if it is entrusted with information, it does not leak. In the 12 years of the ISC's activities, its reports have never leaked until now. This is a serious matter to those who wish to stand behind the ISC being a proper forum for investigating security issues of this sort. Will the Minister convey to the Prime Minister, whose responsibility this is, that there should now be a proper leak inquiry into how the facts that have been in the Select Committee report have been reported in the media over the past month? There are allegations that they were leaked only after the report was submitted by the chairman to No. 10 on the date shown in the report. I do not know whether that is correct, but the allegation is serious. Therefore, it is very important that this matter is cleared up for the committee's reputation and integrity. Some of us have committed a number of years of our life to trying to make sure that the Intelligence and Security Committee became the valuable institution that I believe it to be. I do not want to see it undermined now by failing to be a proper and secure institution in our national life.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, we agree with the noble Lord about the importance of the reliance that can be placed on the Intelligence and Security Committee's confidentiality. Your Lordships should know that police investigations into the leaks are under way. It would be improper for me to comment further, other than to say that we think that the report of the committee is extremely good. It is a comprehensive report. The committee stated that it had access to material. The noble Lord will know from his own experience how carefully that committee scrutinises information and the rigour with which it examines all the material with which it is entrusted during the process of its inquiries.

Lord Judd: My Lords, in thanking my noble friend for the measured and considerate response to these reports, perhaps I may say how glad I was to hear her again to take the opportunity to pay tribute to the families of the victims, to all those involved in the desperate situation on the day, and to the tireless, selfless work of all those involved in maintaining our security. Perhaps I may say also how much I relate to the Minister's point that we have to decide whether or not we are on the side of democracy and that, if we are, we must not let terrorism undermine it.
	Does the Minister agree that, in addition to the important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wright, from the Cross Benches, we are involved in a battle for hearts and minds? Is it not therefore more important than ever to demonstrate as part of our response that, in our society, human rights are not a qualitative, optional extra, but are absolutely central to the functioning of an open, democratic society, and that we will be second to none, whatever the pressures, in upholding our commitment to human rights? Does the Minister also agree that, because of the nature of the battle for hearts and minds, it is doubly important that we not only put a tireless commitment to justice as central to our cause but also ensure that justice must be manifestly seen to be done in all circumstances?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I of course agree with my noble friend but I hope that he will agree with me that it has to be justice for all: justice for the victim as well as appropriate protection for those accused; justice for the community as well as justice for the individual. Human rights have and always will be a question of balance, proportionality and making sure that one individual right does not outweigh another where it is inappropriate for it so to do.

Baroness O'Cathain: My Lords, perhaps I misheard the Minister but I think that she said that the Government were going to the see the relatives of the victims and explain to them why there would not be a public inquiry. However, the call for a public inquiry has come not only from the relatives of the victims; it has come from this House and from a lot of people outside. So will we be given the explanation as to why there should not be a public inquiry?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Absolutely, my Lords. Perhaps I may clarify what I said to the noble Baroness. It is certainly important for those families who were most directly affected by the dreadful events of 7/7 to have an opportunity to discuss intimately and in detail what happened and to have their questions answered.
	I hope that I outlined the Government's reasons for not thinking that there should be a public inquiry, but I am happy to do it more fully. The Government have carefully considered all the possibilities of a public inquiry. I hope that I made it clear that we have already gone down a number of avenues. They include the Home Affairs Select Committee, the ISC, the London Assembly's report which we await, the coroner's review and the ongoing criminal investigations. There will be a plethora of opportunities for us to examine the detail. That detail will become more complete as some of the issues which are currently sub judice are able to be disclosed, debated and discussed. In that context, we believe that the other resources which we have available should be properly directed to responding to the threat. However, we also see that it is clearly necessary for those families who will be wounded, pained and perhaps angered by what happened to those they loved to have a much fuller explanation than perhaps those of us who are more remotely concerned would think was necessary for ourselves.

Medical Research

Baroness Hayman: rose to call attention to medical research and its science base in the United Kingdom; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, from among a distinguished speakers list, has chosen today to make her maiden speech. I am sure that we all look forward to hearing her. I am delighted, too, that my noble friend Lord Sainsbury will reply from the Front Bench. He has made an outstanding contribution in his term of office as Science Minister, and I look forward to hearing from him later.
	I shall speak today about the record and the reputation of medical research in the United Kingdom, and about the resource and regulatory underpinning necessary to ensure continuation of that success. I should declare my interests as a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and chair of the Human Tissue Authority, both of which have regulatory responsibilities in respect of research governance.
	Before that regulatory role, my connections with medical research have always been from a patient perspective, both in various roles in the NHS, where I ended up chairing a trust hospital, and in the charity sector, where, for three years, I chaired Cancer Research UK. From that patient perspective, as well as from the perspective of United Kingdom plc, it is important that we respond to the call of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, in this Chamber a couple of weeks ago, who said that we must,
	"continue to blow the trumpet about the importance of . . . R&D in this country".—[Official Report, 27/4/06; col. 278.]
	In the words of the Government's 2006 Science and innovation investment framework:
	"Health R&D is an area of marked UK strength. In addition to the obvious public health benefits, the quality of the UK's health research base, including medical research, is an important factor in retaining and growing R&D investment from the pharmaceutical industry, already the UK's largest contributor to private R&D, with over £3.3 bn of investment each year. It has a growth rate of 4–5 per cent per year—exports in 2004 were £12.3 bn . . . the UK's biotechnology sector is the largest in Europe and second globally only to the US".
	This year we overtook the United States for the first time when the UK gained top place among the G8 nations in the productivity of its biomedical and pre-clinical research—so, a proud record.
	But back to patients: Professor Raymond Tallis, in his fascinating book Hippocratic Oaths, analyses the benefits that "scientific medicine", as he calls it—the relatively recent discipline of an evidence and research-based approach to therapeutics—has given to man, "the medicine-taking animal". He looks in particular at the contribution to increases in life expectancy made by science, as against those of the broad social advances which gave so much, particularly in the early years of the 20th century, in education, sanitation, housing, nutrition, and health and safety at work. He concludes:
	"Whilst scientific medicine is not acting alone, its contribution—once the foundation stones of public hygiene and the welfare state are in place—is proportionately greater".
	As a nation we have reaped benefits from the home-grown scientists and doctors, from Sir Richard Doll's work—as groundbreaking and important today as we debate the Health Bill as it was when he first made the connection of tobacco with cancer—from Charnley's hip replacements, and from Sir Peter Manfield's discovery of MRI.
	Tallis was looking particularly at the spectacular advances in life expectancy in developed nations in recent years, but medical research can and does make a tremendous contribution in the developing world, even when the infrastructure that we take for granted is lacking. There have been achievements like the virtual eradication of river blindness in west Africa, the transformation—which I have had the privilege to see—in the lives of HIV/AIDS patients in Africa when antiretroviral drugs become available freely to them, and the possibilities opened up by the hope of a vaccine against cervical cancer. The effects of medical research in our country are felt well beyond these shores.
	But for us as individuals and as funders of the National Health Service the challenge is about extending not only life expectancy, but healthy life expectancy. I know that many patient groups are very anxious that publicly supported research should be directed at areas which may not be in the forefront of scientific excitement but really matter to patients day in and day out, areas that have been neglected in the past—improvements in pain control in palliative care, and researching the combination of chemotherapy drugs that will give patients 18 months' survival with a good quality of life rather than 12 months. They are anxious too, like the Alzheimer's Society in its briefing for today's debate, that what is discovered and known on evidence to be the best treatment is put into practice across the board and in all areas. The responsibilities of NICE in this area are particularly important.
	Moreover, there is the importance of clinical academics, an issue that has been discussed many times in your Lordships' House. The recent pledge to fund £2.5 million in this area is welcome, but I do not believe that we can emphasise too much the importance and benefit of having practising clinicians with a research mindset, and to give that research activity the respect it deserves. Professor Iain Chalmers believes that one of the biggest problems is the low status of clinical research. He said:
	"The fact is that the smaller the thing you study in biomedical research, the higher your status—so prions have a high status and people who study whole societies have a very low status".
	But of course we need people who study both.
	There is a very precious baby here that must not be thrown out with the bathwater, and that is the blue-sky, abstruse, intellectually challenging science which is not directed at a specific end, and where the eventual destination of a line of inquiry is completely unknown.
	One of the most fascinating challenges and difficult dilemmas that I faced when I was at Cancer Research UK was how to strike the right balance in funding decisions between, to put it very simplistically, giving brilliant scientists the resources to go away to see what they came up with, as against responding to specific research applications from scientists and doctors already working in a particular field, or considering areas that were under-researched but where there was no demand for funding, such as surgery, which is tremendously important to cancer patients. Where the applications did not come through, we had to consider how to set about capacity-building and stimulating high-class requests in such areas.
	That was exactly the challenge that the Chancellor just put to Sir David Cooksey when he asked him to consider the best arrangements for delivering the full spectrum of publicly supported health research, and from the Nobel prize-winning research conducted by the Medical Research Council to the NHS's world-renowned work on health technology assessment. The budget proposals for that new single fund for health research have been broadly welcomed, but, as I am sure my noble friend is aware, there are issues about which the research community has concerns.
	In particular, the community wants reassurance about the transparency of decision-making and of how we will safeguard the Holdane principle of independence from Ministers in day-to-day decision-making, and about how we will ensure that effective partnerships continue with the medical research charities, given their enormously important investment—about £700 million a year—in medical research. I know that there is also concern about infrastructure costs within the NHS in a programme grant-giving regime and ensuring that teaching and research hospitals are properly funded.
	I want to highlight another concern. Government strategy states:
	"Few, if any, other countries have a health service that provides researchers with the potential to access virtually the entire population for an integrated system of primary, secondary and tertiary care. It is a unique selling point for public sector researchers, charities and private organisations".
	It is from that unique selling point, that invaluable base, that the National Cancer Research Network, established in 2001, trebled the proportion of cancer patients coming into clinical trials, putting us ahead of Europe and the US. The UK Clinical Research Collaboration hopes to replicate that across the board.
	My concern is that the increasing fragmentation of provision within the NHS through independent treatment and diagnostic centres and the use of the private sector, where the impetus for research is hard to see, should not dilute that unique resource and integration on which clinical trial success so crucially depends.
	To move from resources to regulation, the Health Minister, Rosie Winterton, recently said that,
	"the UK is seen as a world leader in embryonic stem cell research, and this is largely due to the effective regulations that control it".
	That is right. It is possible to strike a balance and provide a regulatory framework that supports rather than hamstrings researchers. If we get the regulation right, and take the public with us—that takes us into the area of the public understanding of science, which is another whole debate, about which the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, has spoken in this House—we can provide a framework that both gives public confidence and allows research to flourish. There are difficult areas here, to which we have to face up, and difficult balances to be struck. I especially welcome the AMS's recent report, Personal data for public good, which highlights some of those balances.
	Things can go terribly wrong if we lose public confidence. I was a Minister responsible for GM crops during the time of the greatest public concern about the issue. It is frightening when the ability to have a rational debate is taken away from you in a wave of public feeling without any proper underpinning of communication. The communication of risk is an area that we have discussed before but which is of tremendous importance.
	We need to be smarter in how we deal with European legislation. We need to get in earlier on decision-making. We need to ensure that the specific characteristics of UK research, such as its large charitable sector, are fully recognised. Finally, we just have to take a more robust approach against the seemingly constant desire to gold-plate.
	Finally, perhaps I may say something else about what is necessary for the sector to flourish, and pinpoint another area of effective regulation. That is in the field of animals used in scientific procedures. I very much welcome the Government's action in legislating in this area through the Serious and Organised Crime Act and the police's willingness to investigate and prosecute those who use threats, intimidation and violence. I also applaud the efforts of the Research Defence Society and others to bring together patients' groups, medical charities, citizens and researchers to speak up for research. Transparency is a very powerful weapon in this area. We have nothing to be ashamed of in our regulatory framework, and the public recognise the importance of the work that is done.
	The Motion refers to the science base as well as to medical research, because it is clear to anyone who has worked in this area or read anything about it that medical research needs a science base that goes far wider than conventional biomedical disciplines if it is to continue to succeed. As a trustee of Kew Gardens, I immediately think that plant scientists can make a contribution to medical research. Others, I am sure, will speak of physics and of chemistry. Then there is information technology—I have learnt a new phrase today, "pervasive computing"—which will be tremendously important in health service research in the future. The mechanical sciences can also help with different delivery systems for medicines, as can statisticians, social scientists, ethicists and philosophers, whom we need to help us to grapple with the ethical and social dilemmas and implications of medical advances. Above all, we need co-operation and cross-fertilisation between those different areas.
	That point was brought home to me yesterday when I read the obituary in the Guardian of James Ambrose, the radiologist who helped to pioneer CT scanning. He was approached by Godfrey Hounsfield, a physicist who had never done any medical research and worked for a record company but was interested in this area. Their collaboration ended up with Hounsfield getting the Nobel prize in 1979. Ambrose's contribution was less grandly recognised, but without the partnership of the two—the clinician and the scientist—millions of patients would have been the poorer.
	As politicians, we have the opportunity to play our part by creating an environment where the educational, financial and regulatory framework is one in which those sorts of partnerships and discoveries can continue to benefit patients and the public in the future. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Colwyn: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for securing the debate this afternoon and for her very clear and concise remarks. She will not be surprised if I use the opportunity to say a few brief words about dentistry and dental research. The noble Baroness and I have debated dentistry many times in the past few years, and I assure her that I am not going to discuss the new dental contract and its effect on NHS dentistry. But I do wish to commend the excellent contribution that dental research has made to healthcare policy, and to highlight the worrying workforce planning aspects and the teacher/research pressures of the dental clinical academic research sector.
	The UK has an enlarging and ageing population, and the significance of wider psychological, social and functional elements in constituting the condition of health is now widely acknowledged. Society is becoming increasingly consumerist, and NHS reforms are attempting to harness consumer power to drive standards up and waiting lists down. Dental research is part of the political debate about patient access to dental provision and how good oral health is central to good general health. If we are to pursue preventive dentistry and good public health, it is imperative that we champion evidence-based patient care.
	There have been many examples. Recent well researched oral health studies have provided evidence to wider public health debates. For example, Birmingham University has done research into fizzy drinks and tooth erosion, and how the consumption of such drinks by 12 year-olds massively increases the chance of erosion. The university found that four or more glasses a day increase the chance of erosion by 252 per cent This type of work should play a key part in supporting government policy-making to phase out fizzy drinks from school vending machines.
	The UK is a major contributor to oral and dental research, but it often lacks the infrastructure to grasp the opportunities to develop the applications. An example of this was the research into light-cured dental resins. It was initiated in the UK, but its support environment was subsequently moved to the USA and Japan, and Japan ended up buying up the technology.
	The adoption of new technologies is more likely when demanded by patients and when financial incentives are available. Conversely, new treatments may be less likely to be implemented if they threaten the status of any group of clinicians or professional position. A recent staffing level report by the Council of Heads of Medical Schools and Council of Heads and Deans of Dental Schools found that dental clinical academic numbers had decreased by 6 per cent in just one year. The study also stated that there were more than 200 vacant senior academic posts in medicine, with the staffing problems being even more acute in academic dentistry. Yet the Government are increasing undergraduate training places by 25 per cent How do those two sets of statistics sit comfortably together?
	Fundamental decisions need to be taken when assessing the UK's future role in research, innovation and the development of new technologies in the provision of oral healthcare. How much is the country prepared to invest in the generation of new technology? What is society prepared to fund researchers and innovators for? Is the UK a manufacturing or a service country? Do we want to produce high-quality scientists? Does the UK wish to be seen as an innovator?
	One challenge of the introduction of new technologies will be the impact that they have on the development of the dental team. An individual's knowledge base will rapidly be out of date. Much more emphasis will be put on lifelong learning. Is it possible that the whole workforce might need to be retrained over a 10-year cycle? The value of change will need to be assessed. One drawback of systematic reviews is that, in a rapidly changing environment, by the time the retrospective assessment has been completed further innovation may render the assessment out of date.
	The demographics of the UK will change. The movement into the country of individuals from overseas will show a change in the genetic mix, which may have an impact on the predisposition to oral diseases. The attitude to technological development in the UK is criticised in some quarters. Funding and ethnical approval are hard to obtain. A number of important policies need to be considered to facilitate technological development for benefits for the practice of dentistry.
	Key to that are UK policies on research funding. The new technologies are not unique to dentistry and need to be exploited within dentistry. Technological advances in the management of oral conditions need to take place within mainstream research. Collaboration between research groups should be facilitated rather than discouraged. Lessons should be learnt from the experiences of research councils which are no longer working in their own traditional areas but are looking at bringing people together from different backgrounds. Future developments in dentistry are more likely to come when links with physicists, mathematicians and engineers are established.
	UK patent laws put those who are in UK technology development at a disadvantage when compared to the USA. Exploitation of research can be hindered by the wishes of employers or sponsors, such as funding councils and health departments. The UK policy on clinical trials needs urgent review—perhaps moving away from the Cochrane review approach to one based more on risk assessment.
	A well trained research community with opportunities and a society prepared to invest in research and innovation are required. If that capacity is there, patients and dentists will benefit. There is an onus on universities and all stakeholders within the dental and research communities at large to stand back and look at where we are going. Academic dentistry is at a crossroads. Will we be modern and different, and grasp the opportunity to change? Bureaucracy and red tape that stifle an innovative and developmental culture need to be challenged.

Baroness Fritchie: My Lords, it is with gratitude and respect that I rise to speak in your Lordships' House for the first time. My gratitude is for the warmth of welcome, since taking my place in the House, from noble Lords across all Benches and from all staff—most particularly, from the Convenor of the Cross Benches, my noble friend Lord Williamson, and his staff. My respect is for being able to experience at close hand the courtesy, expertise, wisdom and integrity that reside in this House.
	I am grateful, too, to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for initiating this debate, which is of particular interest to me. I am a generalist by background with a number of special interests, one of which is health. Previously, I was a lay member of the General Medical Council and chair of an NHS region. Currently, I am chair of the Chronic Pain Policy Coalition and a vice-chair of the British Lung Foundation. It is with that broad interest that I wish to contribute to this debate.
	Like the noble Lord, Lord Patel, in the recent debate on universities research and development, I applaud the announcement made by the Chancellor in his Budget Statement proposing a merger of the Medical Research Council and NHS research funding. However, a number of key issues still need to be addressed. A central issue is getting the balance right in what drives research. Is it the health and welfare of patients and the population as a whole, or is it economic considerations? Who will decide the priorities and what will be the involvement of patients and lay people unconnected with the commercial and academic sectors?
	A further concern is that the small amounts of money currently devoted to research on public health could be squeezed in favour of basic research in the medical sciences that will have commercial potential. There may be little or no commercial possibility in some public health research but enormous potential population benefit, which of course will deliver broader economic benefit, although not to our pharmaceutical industries or to our successful export market. We know that our pharmaceutical industries are a great economic strength. However, a balance must be struck. This makes the question of who will be involved in deciding our research priorities one of some significance.
	Another area to consider is the contribution of the separate research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. It has much to offer towards improving the health of the population. Current examples of its research projects include: innovations in cancer pain relief technologies, ethics and practices; determinants of alcohol abusers' success in changing; and understanding adolescent smoking initiation, a four-year longitudinal study.
	We also need to strike the balance between research into treatment of conditions and research into prevention of conditions. In my work with the Chronic Pain Policy Coalition, I have learnt that chronic pain affects one in seven people in the United Kingdom and one in three households, and that arthritis is the most common cause. From the British Pain Society, I have learnt how chronic pain changes lives. Some 49 per cent of people who live with chronic pain have taken considerable time off work, 72 per cent have become less physically active, 24 per cent have been diagnosed with depression and 25 per cent have lost their jobs. Therefore, a coherent research programme into the treatment of chronic pain and an effective management strategy would make a huge difference.
	I want to say a word or two about research and ageing. The April edition of the British Medical Journal drew attention to the fact that, of all the studies related to pain, just 1 per cent addressed the topic of pain and ageing. More generally, as elderly people are the main consumers of both new and old drugs for common diseases, it is essential that they are included in randomised controlled trials. In addition, research into models of care and models of rehabilitation methods for older people are needed.
	A conclusion that I draw from my own researches for this debate is the importance of partnership working and the emphasis on scientific method in the training of all health professionals at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. Nurses and therapists may currently be more experienced in single-case and observational study designs, whereas doctors may focus more on the merits of randomised controlled trials. We need both. We need multidisciplinary research groups that marry the learning between the quantitative and the qualitative. These multidisciplinary groups would include the Association of Medical Research Charities and, of course, patients themselves. This approach applies not only to research and ageing, but also to many other kinds of research.
	Further, the organisation of the delivery of healthcare remains an under-researched subject area. If there were a better evidence base showing what worked best in delivering health services, perhaps the NHS would require less reorganisation, which may be as welcome to the Minister as to those who work within the health service.
	I also suggest that more useful work could be done to ensure that positive outcomes of medical research are efficiently introduced to individual practice and into organisations as a whole. Perhaps the old R&D label could be recast as RD&I: research, development and implementation. This would not only mean a well managed roll-out programme; it would also capture and evaluate the data and be able to provide effective feedback.
	My experience of chairing the national review group into the failure of a well researched hip prosthesis was that our work was hampered by a lack of information and data capture. I am pleased to say that, as a result of our work and our recommendations, we now have a national hip register so that the performance and effectiveness of the different hip prostheses can be properly measured and monitored.
	In conclusion, when it comes to medical research, we need to consistently raise our game. The merger of the MRC and NHS research funding is a good basis for better-focused research, but much still remains to be done. Einstein once said that the problems we face cannot be resolved by the same level of thinking as that which gave rise to them. Therefore, in addition to new structures, we need new and energetic thinking.

Lord Haskel: My Lords, it is my privilege to congratulate and thank the noble Baroness on behalf of the whole House on her maiden speech. She explained her deep involvement in medical matters and, thanks to that, she spoke with insight and knowledge about them.
	But the noble Baroness has had an impact on other aspects of our lives. She described herself as a generalist. How true. In 1999 she became Commissioner for Public Appointments. She was reappointed in 2002 and her appointment was extended in 2005, so she must be doing a great job in ensuring integrity and diversity in public appointments.
	The noble Baroness spoke of ageing. Women have greatly benefited from her involvement with the Pennell Initiative for Women's Health, which addresses the needs of women over 45. She has received many honours from universities, including an honorary professorship in creative leadership at York University. What a wonderful and imaginative chair. She is an ambassador for places as far apart as St Andrews in Fife and Gloucestershire—places, no doubt, to which she feels a sense of loyalty and of gratitude.
	There is more: charities, a building society, hobbies and family—she is a very busy person. Nevertheless, I hope that we will see her often here so that we can all benefit from her large and important contribution to public life.

Noble Lords: Hear, hear!

Lord Haskel: My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hayman is absolutely right: we will not progress in health research without a strong science base. The science base is essential, but is it sufficient? Is a good science base enough to ensure that a good idea in the laboratory becomes a good idea in the market? The answer is no. It seems to me that there are three additional essential elements that we need to add to our science base. First, an outward-looking and open economy, secondly, a well regulated medical sector, and, finally, a well developed knowledge transfer system. Let me briefly explore each of these elements, because without them our science base could become an ivory tower.
	An outward-looking and open economy is essential because research is international—it knows no boundaries—and so it does not matter where it is done as long as we benefit from it. It is a part of globalisation that we should welcome, and welcome the people that go with it. Critics of this policy—and there are many of them—argue that this openness sets off a race to the bottom. They argue that competition from emerging economies will constantly undercut our pay and conditions. But, in truth, we are learning that the opposite is true. Openness will help us win the race to the top—and winning the race to the top means giving up the low standards and old technologies which hold us back. This is why we need an open and welcoming economy in addition to our science base.
	My noble friend Lady Hayman also spoke of sensitive regulation being an essential addition to our science base. I agree. As she said, without this, there will be less public support, but we also need public support because the medical records, tissues and tests used for research belong to the public. The public must see public benefit.
	Biobank, and the way it has been set up, licensed and regulated, certainly has public support, but there are further questions. What are the property rights over tissues and embryos? These are ethical as well as commercial considerations, but regulators must put people in a position of control over their tissues if that is what they want.
	Regulation also affects the researchers. In a debate on 27 April, my noble friend Lord Winston gave the rather worrying example of stem cell researchers giving up their work because regulators gave the impression that it was in some way disreputable and required extra surveillance. I hope the Minister will take note of that.
	Then there is the regulation of the commercialisation of medical research. When researchers become entrepreneurs, the regulatory balance is difficult. When I was in the United States recently, knowing that this debate was coming up, I asked some venture capitalists whom I knew from my previous life in business where the smart money was going in medical research. Diagnostics, was the answer. They told me that there is a new generation of tests which represents some of the first fruits of the long-anticipated genome revolution. Those tests could pave the way to personalised medicine and because of this, there could be—in their words—pharmaceutical-like profit margins. Fortunately, we have NICE in Britain to assess the value of these things. This is an important part of the regulatory process.
	My final point concerns knowledge transfer networks. A top-class science base will remain a top-class ivory tower unless it leads to top-class products and companies. Science does not easily transform into a business. It is to the credit of the Government and my noble friend the Minister that over the years they have actively set up knowledge transfer networks to achieve this. I declare an interest as the honorary chairman of one such knowledge transfer network. Knowledge transfer networks speed up innovation, and the development of the research is not just left to chance. Healthcare workers and scientists add value to each other by each providing the answer to the others' needs. But these answers frequently lie outside a single source of knowledge; to make progress and to succeed in innovation today, you need a matrix of information. My noble friend Lady Hayman described this, speaking about IT, social science and, I think, record players.
	It is collaboration between different disciplines that creates innovation. Public policy cannot create innovation in healthcare, but it can ensure that the ingredients are there. With the continuing investment in our science base, our open policy towards trade and science, our careful and thoughtful approach to commercial and ethical regulation and our understanding and encouragement of the networks by which science becomes healthcare, we can become a global hub for collaborative innovation and research and development in healthcare—a worthwhile and achievable ambition for our country.

Baroness O'Cathain: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for introducing this debate. Even though I am not involved in the medical sector and am not a scientist, I suggest that none of us can ignore the importance of medical research. The results of medical research have a bearing on our existence from conception to death, and all life in-between. We take it pretty well for granted, and seldom give sufficient thought to the huge and continuing benefits such science-based research has brought to us all.
	I admit that I was not particularly interested until a mutation in a gene changed the lives of all the members of my family. My immediate family is affected by a rare inherited familial condition known as the Li-Fraumeni syndrome. The condition greatly increases an individual's risk of developing cancer. Families with this syndrome carry a mutation in a gene for a molecule called p53, an important factor in controlling cell growth, preventing cells from multiplying if their DNA is damaged. When p53 is damaged, cells go on dividing even if their DNA is damaged, and this can result in cancer. Another version of the syndrome carries a fault in a gene called CHK2, known as "check two". I think there was a reference to this on the radio yesterday morning. This gene is thought to play a role in repairing damaged DNA.
	The syndrome can be confirmed by genetic tests for individual genetic faults. Such screening is available as a result of past medical research, and further research in this area has led to programmes being put in place for people from Li-Fraumeni families. They include annual check-ups for children and breast screening from the age of 20. In addition, because of the wide range of cancers that can develop, individuals with the syndrome are urged to discuss any health problems that concern them which last longer than about three weeks. Such programmes are a direct follow-on from the original medical research that discovered the syndrome in the first place.
	I have gone into a bit of detail on this as it shows just how important it is to continue to support medical research, not only to save lives but also to reduce the huge need for resources required by health providers to cope with the sufferers of this syndrome, for example, if it is not diagnosed before the cancers start multiplying. Sadly, both my young siblings died prematurely, in large measure, I feel, because they were not diagnosed early enough as being Li-Fraumeni syndrome carriers. It is almost certain that it was passed on to them from my mother, who also died of cancer at a very early age, but before genetic testing was developed. Some 40 years ago Li-Fraumeni was not widely known.
	In the case of one of my nephews, however, I have great hope. The research has progressed so far that he may well avoid the fate that befell his mother, my younger sister. He was diagnosed as having Li-Fraumeni when he developed adrenal cancer at the age of three. He had a torrid time. He lost a kidney, pituitary glands and goodness knows what else. It seemed like a total catastrophe for all those who remained, but now, some 25 years on, he is a healthy Oxford graduate leading a normal life as a father. His life is very little inconvenienced other than by regular medication and regular monitoring. The offspring of my siblings are regularly checked, and the deep anxiety of their possible, if not probable, succumbing to cancer has been lifted. Without medical research, that would not have been the outcome.
	Cancer affects, or will affect, each one of us, either directly or tangentially through the experiences of close family members, friends or colleagues. Indeed, we have experienced it in this House. When this debate was brought to my attention, my mind quickly turned to the importance of medical research for cancer, for obvious reasons, and the importance of saving lives. I approached Cancer Research UK for background data. That organisation and its predecessors have achieved monumental public awareness of the causes and treatment of cancer. It has certainly lifted the stigma of cancer. No longer is it referred to in whispered tones as "the big C", as it was when my mother developed cancer.
	Cancer Research UK has been at the forefront of focusing on lifestyle changes that we can and must adopt to fight this dastardly disease, and that is also as the result of medical research. I will not be tempted to get into the subject of smoking. Through the activities of Cancer Research UK we are all aware that one in three people will develop cancer at some time in their lives. What we may not know is that half of all cancers are potentially preventable. Without medical research that would never have been the case. Medical research has been responsible for the development of treatments that have helped save thousands of lives, and I believe the UK is the European leader in the development of novel anti-cancer treatments.
	I have deliberately homed in on just one area where medical research has a huge impact, purely because I have had first-hand experience of both the benefits and the ongoing treatments. I know I have dealt with just a small part of the whole UK medical research picture, and that I have concentrated on applied research. I do not want to be seen as a blinkered, single-subject individual, and I am very aware of the major impact medical research has had on the UK economy.
	For many years we prided ourselves on being the fourth largest economy in the world. Sadly we have slipped, for reasons known to all of us. However, our ranking in terms of share of citations in biological sciences and pre-clinical and health-related sciences is third in the world and first among the G8 nations. That, by any measure, is a most encouraging achievement when you consider that we have 1 per cent of the world's population. It shows that we are on the up by comparison with the slippage in overall ratings of world economic success.
	In the helpful brief produced by Universities UK I was pleased to see—this has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman—that the Government have taken a lead and are to create a single research budget for the Medical Research Council and the NHS R&D programme, amounting to at least £1 billion per annum. I was even more pleased to learn, as the noble Baroness has said, that a very good business friend of mine, Sir David Cooksey, has been appointed to lead a review of the issues and to advise the Government on the best design and institutional arrangements for the new merged fund. That is an excellent choice. He will certainly stop any of the nonsense that tends to creep in when new units are formed, regarding who should be top, second or, indeed, third dog. We have even been promised a date for the publication of the review—next month—and not fobbed off with "shortly", "soon", or "as quickly as possible", which is the normal response to requests for firm timetables.
	Backing winners has always been a good policy. I hope that the Minister will reaffirm—I am sure that he will—that such is his policy too and that the UK Government will continue to back UK medical research so that it continues to be one of the major players in the international field of medical research.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for obtaining and initiating this important debate. She and I first met when we were fellow chairmen of NHS hospital trusts. I remember meeting her when I was the Chief Inspector of Prisons and was shocked by the treatment of women prisoners at Holloway, who were kept in chains while they were in labour in the hospital of which the noble Baroness was the chair. She was as appalled as I was at what was going on. I discovered that rather than just being appalled, she was actively doing something about the matter and was trying to improve the conditions.
	I was particularly interested to find that the noble Baroness was actively promoting research into other ways of treating prisoners; namely, that information on what was wrong with them could be video-linked to a doctor in another hospital and analysed there, rather than undergoing the expensive process of taking people under guard from prison into another hospital. Therefore, it does not surprise me at all to find the noble Baroness energetically pursuing the cause of medical research in many areas, not just in general scientific development.
	It is a huge pleasure and privilege to follow the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Fritchie. She and I were appointed to this House on the same day. I remember looking at her CV and being absolutely gobsmacked by its breadth. Having heard what she had to say, I can see exactly why so many organisations wish to have her on their pay roll.
	I should like to pick up three points that have been made so far. First, I should like to pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, that the research that we support should be directed at areas which have been neglected in the past, and her concern about fragmentation in the NHS when matters are followed up. I want to focus on a poor relation in this scene; namely, prisons. Finally, I refer to the noble Baroness's point about cross-fertilisation, co-operation and partnership between patients and public being so hugely important.
	I refer to two points made by my noble friend Lady Fritchie: first, the importance of deciding the priority of research; and, secondly, her point about research development and implementation going together. I wish to raise that because prisons and the prison population are the newest part of the United Kingdom population to join the NHS. It has been a matter of much concern that a very large number of people in prison are suffering from a huge variety of mental health problems. Until very recently nobody seemed to be picking up the responsibility of doing research into the incidence but also the implications of what they were suffering from and what ought to be done about it. No one was taking the lead in questioning whether imprisonment was making the condition of the patient either better or worse. As far as I was concerned, on inspecting it with my psychiatrist, it was invariably made worse because the conduct of imprisonment made for conditions which were completely against the proper treatment of a mental disorder. Coupled with the fact that there was totally inadequate psychiatric staffing, it meant that people were inevitably going to get worse.
	I am absolutely delighted to declare an interest, in that I have been co-opted as an adviser by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, which announced recently that one of its priorities was going to be research into every aspect of prison health, which so far has been neglected. I pick up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and my noble friend Lady Fritchie because it seems to me that the Sainsbury Centre's work needs to have a priority put on it, but the priority should not necessarily be the priority of the centre—it should be the priority of the user. In theory, the user is the public, because all the prisoners are going to come out of prison, and their mental and physical health is a matter of public interest. It is also a matter for the Prison Service and the Home Office, to make certain that what could be done for people in prison is done, and it is a matter for the NHS, which will have to provide care.
	What concerns me is that there does not seem to be agreement in the direction of the research coming from the Home Office and the NHS, to see that those people for whom they are responsible are having what is needed identified and prepared. It is no good just going into the research side; the implementation must go with it. Therefore, on behalf of the Sainsbury Centre, I am recommending that we should work together with the Prison Service and the NHS to find out what they feel is the priority in what should be looked at, and then enable that to be done, but only if there is a clear understanding that we are not just doing so for the sake of it, but are identifying what needs to go into the mainstream on behalf of the public and the patients.

Lord Turnberg: My Lords, I am delighted that my noble friend Lady Hayman has managed to secure this debate. She introduced it with her characteristic intelligence and flair. I also say how much I appreciated the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, which demonstrated enormous experience and knowledge and bodes very well for the future. I declare my interests as scientific adviser to the Association of Medical Research Charities, as a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and as an ex-medical researcher.
	I say at the outset that despite the problems that may beset research in the UK, we do pretty well by any standards. We rank second only to the USA in any measure of medical research output. It has recently been demonstrated by Sir David King in an OST report of 2004 that we are way ahead of all other G8 countries. If you look at the amount of research that we get out per pound input, we are top; we do pretty well with Nobel prizes in medicine too. We have a Government who are clearly supportive of medical research, with a whole series of funding initiatives, and we have a strong voluntary sector with medical research charities putting in £3.25 billion in the past five years.
	It is increasingly clear that we are gaining enormously from all this investment in terms of an increase in healthy lifespan. We are gaining two years' extension of life in every 10; that is, a child born today will live two years longer than one born 10 years ago. We are gaining about 30 minutes during the course of this debate. Half of that is due to advances in medical care. That gain is reflected in economic benefits arising from increased productivity. Recent calculations by the LSE show that, as in the USA, we gain £5 for every £1 put into medical research. A 5:1 return on investment must be music to the ears of the Minister.
	With all that good news, it came as a surprise to hear that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is no slouch in reporting medical research and other research—he is excellent in that—surprised us by proposing to amalgamate the funding of the MRC and the NHS R&D budgets. But the unintended consequences of such a move may be considerable and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, I have some concerns. The danger lies in the potential distortion of the balance between basic and applied research, away from the science base which is providing rich dividends, towards the applied, where there is a distinct possibility of its diffusion into NHS service—just as the NHS R&D funding is diffused into service, rather than into R&D. I hope that the Minister can provide us with some reassurance on all of that. Of course we are fortunate that Sir David Cooksey is overseeing this amalgamation, but he will need to pursue a delicate balancing act if he is to achieve a potentiation of research, rather than a damaging outcome.
	I turn now to another problem that poses a threat to epidemiological research, which relies on information about patient data. Perhaps I may give an example. There was a suggestion that Gulf War syndrome patients were more likely to get cancer than others. It was only by an examination that compared the clinical records of thousands of Gulf War victims and other veterans that it was possible to show that there was no increased incidence. Similarly, only large-scale studies of the case records of thousands of children proved that MMR vaccination did not cause autism.
	I believe that everyone—the public, patients and researchers—has a common interest in wanting such research to be carried out in an efficient and careful way, so that patients' confidentiality is preserved and that they will not be harmed or embarrassed by it. But now there has grown up an extremely complicated patchwork of UK and EU legislation—including the Data Protection Act, the common law on confidentiality, the Patient Information Advisory Group, Caldicott Guardians and the GMC—all of which require satisfaction; that is only a partial list. It is no wonder that researchers and ethics committees are confused and err towards preventing, rather than encouraging, research. Yet in most instances it is the interpretation of the law, rather than what the law allows or prohibits, that is the problem. That is because the law as it stands allows such research to be undertaken without consent, provided that such use is necessary and proportionate, respecting privacy and public interest benefit.
	A reasonable and rational balance can be struck. All this is spelt out in an excellent publication from the Academy of Medical Sciences, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, referred, entitled Personal data for public good. It gives clear guidance on what can and should be done to inform and engage the public, to help ethics committees and researchers about what is allowable and what is not, and to ensure that a reasonable balance is struck between protecting individuals' rights and confidentiality and the public's need for research.
	I hope that the Minister will take note of those recommendations. Unfortunately, I suspect that this matter is not in his department's responsibility; but, perhaps, he can pass on the message to the Department of Health, in whose court it may be.

Baroness Murphy: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for raising this debate. In preparing for it, I have been torn as to whether to approach the subject from the point of view of my current position as chair of a London strategic health authority—which I am shortly to relinquish—or that of the new position I will take up in the autumn as chair of the council of governors at St George's, at the University of London, which is predominantly a medical school and a healthcare educational establishment. While one might think that those positions might be similar, in fact they are a little different. There are tensions and dilemmas, to which many noble Lords have referred, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, between, on the one hand, what medical researchers and universities want and the science base that is relevant to developing that research capacity, and, on the other hand, what healthcare services would like medical researchers to address and the basic science education and training that can best serve our current health service needs.
	First, this is probably my last shot for the London health service and so I shall be wholly partisan. I shall be rather biased in what I say and I am sure that, as I speak, noble Lords will remind themselves that I am being partisan. I am particularly concerned about the decision to bring together MRC funds and NHS R&D. We know very well that there has been not a 100 years war but at least a 30 years war in trying to drag out NHS R&D funds from the infrastructure of London teaching hospitals and one or two other hospitals, where they are embedded deep within the fabric of the buildings and the establishment.
	We all want to see NHS R&D funds properly used. There has been a gradual improvement in identifying those funds, even though some of the Culyer gaming was something of a fiction. However, we have finally identified the funds and we know broadly where they are going. There has recently been increasing success in getting the funds attached to the right sort of research. The cancer research network has undoubtedly shown the way because NHS medical "oncocrats", if I can call them that, have always been better organised than other specialties, and other research networks are far less advanced. Now, it seems to me, when NHS R&D has just started to be properly developed—we have identified it and are beginning to turn it round a bit—it is going to be removed, centralised and returned in the form of academic centres, redistributed, I deeply suspect, on geopolitical grounds rather than on economic, health or science grounds.
	There is much hyped-up misinformation about London's share of the NHS R&D funds. London currently attracts less than a third of them and, in fact, the figure is in line with London's overall share of the higher education market. The prospect of a wanton withdrawal of revenue, which currently supports not only academic posts and research but, as I have said, also the infrastructure of some hospitals, is a pretty frightening calamity. Few teaching hospitals have yet got their heads around what that will mean.
	North of Watford there may be a good deal of optimism that at last these dastardly London teaching hospitals will get their come-uppance and that academic centres will magically alight on places that have the capacity but have never had the money, but there is no guarantee that the attractions of London as an international centre, attracting overseas researchers and private sector investors, will transfer elsewhere in the UK. After all, the Olympic factor was fine for London but it did not seem fine in Manchester.
	The health market in London is worth in excess of £8 billion a year—7 per cent of the capital's GDP. We employ 200,000 people. There are five medical schools and, altogether, 25 universities in higher education supporting 75 NHS hospitals, 46 private hospitals, 80 biotechnology companies and 50 clinical research centres, and of course we train 40 per cent of the workforce in the UK. The contribution made by London's health service and London's NHS R&D is quite astonishing.
	We want to ensure that these funds are better used to support the NHS's long-term strategy for health but I claim that that will not be achieved by the wholesale destruction of a thriving economy in London. There are better, more subtle ways of targeting these funds and improving outputs to the benefit of everyone. But it will happen. The jackpot should be £1.3 billion but, like the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, I was very anxious to hear the announcement that the single pot would be £1 billion. I wondered what had happened to the other £300 million. There is a little gap there, and perhaps the Minister will be able to reassure us that the intention is to produce the full moneys.
	I would also like to be reassured that the priorities of Professor Sally Davies, who has been a great champion in the Department of Health for clinical and health services research, and the priorities of Professor Colin Blakemore at the MRC will be at one on how this future jackpot will be spent. I have my doubts that there is yet an agreement, but I look forward to seeing how it works out.
	I turn briefly to the education of basic sciences for underpinning. I am concerned that we are not engaging school leavers with top science qualifications in medicine. We are increasingly developing a medical research community that is far removed from the medical delivery of healthcare within our teaching hospitals. Clinical and applied research seem to move in parallel lines these days, which is very different from how it used to be.
	Professor Roger Jones, in a letter to the BMJ last week said that we need to do applied research, but we need translational research. He said:
	"They need to understand that translational research doesn't mean getting the protein out of the test tube into the zebra fish, but getting the therapeutic intervention into the patient and population".

Lord Bhattacharyya: My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, one of the UK's greatest assets is its science base. Much of the credit has to go to the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, for his unstinting support for the sector. Research in healthcare and medicine is the jewel in that crown. Since the discovery of DNA in Cambridge more than half a century ago, our scientists have redefined modern medicine. The UK today has tremendous strength in research and development across the whole health sector. We all benefit from health research, and today there is tremendous value to the economy from investment in health R&D.
	Our pharmaceutical industry alone generates a trade surplus of £3.75 billion each year. In his Budget, the Chancellor announced combining the R&D spend managed by the Medical Research Council, the Office of Science and Innovation and those of the Department of Health. I, too, welcome that bold step.
	This has created a dedicated, ring-fenced annual fund of more than £1 billion for health R&D. Sir David Cooksey's review does not have much time. Perhaps I could make a few suggestions. Obviously the new funding mechanism will have to fit into the nation's health priorities and science objectives. It will have to ensure key economic objectives: to produce high quality translational health research and deliver real economic as well as health benefits from the science base.
	I firmly believe that funding should continue to be awarded on the basis of excellence across the whole spectrum of health, from basic to clinical to public health. We must maintain and enhance our skill base covering the whole range of science, engineering and technology, all of which is employed in supporting the nation's healthcare. I do not think that we should underestimate how long it will take for scientific breakthroughs to become practical medical interventions. It often takes decades.
	I urge researchers to be patient. We must not raise false public expectations that fundamental research will rapidly produce miracle cures. Also, I do not think that the crucial role of technology and innovation has been appreciated. Only now are we fully recognising the importance of innovation. I am pleased to see that after more than a decade the Office of Science and Technology has become the Office of Science and Innovation. We spend some £3 billion a year on university research and only £100 million on encouraging the exploitation of that research in the form of innovation and knowledge transfer.
	Is it not time to establish a technology and innovation council to join the ranks of the research councils to be specifically charged with fostering technology transfer? I have been arguing the case for such a council for more than a decade. After a long gestation now is the time for it to be born. We must step up our innovation effort with an institutional voice charged with making it happen.
	You only have to watch an episode of the wonderful US drama series "ER" to realise the amount of technology being used in modern healthcare. While "ER" is a work of fiction, a weighty work of fact was produced by my noble friend Lord Warner in November 2004, the report of the health industry's taskforce. The taskforce defined the nature of the healthcare industry as an exciting, fast-growing sector, and went on to identify the opportunities for the United Kingdom.
	What are these healthcare industries? They are the manufacturers of all the products used in the diagnosis, prevention, monitoring or treatment of human illness or handicap. They have grown out of other industries, such as engineering, informatics and biotechnology, which produce a vast array of devices, equipment and consumables for the health sector: from simple plasters and syringes to wheelchairs, from diagnostic test kits for blood transfusions to filtration devices, from radiotherapy machines to defibrillators and pacemakers, from anaesthetic machines and monitors to the highest of high technology scanners—all regulated under the European Medical Devices Directive.
	More than half the UK population has contact with a medical device in any one day. It is a vast and fast-growing market: worldwide, it is already more than $170 billion. The UK market is about £6 billion, £4.5 billion of which is supplied by UK manufacturers, which also export some £3 billion of healthcare products. The Cooksey review could make a significant contribution to stimulating this industry. Since the creation of MRC Technology, the UK Clinical Research Collaboration and the new NHS R&D strategy, set out in Best research for best health, there is much to be done.
	I declare a personal interest. All my academic life, I have been working at the science, engineering and technology end of the spectrum, transferring knowledge from university research bases to companies, working with NHS hospitals and medical faculties. As the director of the Warwick Manufacturing Group, I realised that there is a tremendous amount that one can transfer from engineering and technology, and what we have done in manufacturing industries, to the health sector. Therefore, I have decided to set up a £100 million programme, of which 20 per cent of the annual amount will be directed to healthcare. I am appointing a new chair in healthcare informatics, bringing one of the world's leading practitioners from Canada—the first of a series of appointments in this area.
	Imagine: I work in the manufacturing industry and see the correlation between what happens in other sectors of industry and healthcare. If we can learn from one sector, and are able to transfer that to other sectors, there will be a tremendous improvement in productivity, such as we see day in, day out in the industrial sectors. Everything that Peter Gershon said about improving the efficiency and productivity of the health sector has come out of very simple technologies—not rocket science. We must learn from other sectors, and have a totally interdisciplinary approach in medical research and development.

Lord Acton: My Lords, thanks to medical research, I expect to see the new year. Perhaps I may explain.
	In March last year, I had an emergency operation for colon cancer. A subsequent scan revealed cancer spots on my liver. The doctor said that I must have chemotherapy. I asked, "If I don't have chemotherapy, how long have I got?". He said "10 to 20 months". So I had chemotherapy.
	Before the treatment began, people gave me well meaning advice—not necessarily up to date. I was warned that, during chemotherapy, I would constantly be sick. However, the scientists had produced a wholly effective nausea suppressant, and I never felt the slightest twinge of sickness. Medical researchers had developed an array of modern drugs which were dripped into my shoulder every fortnight. After the seventh treatment, I had a scan. "The news couldn't be better", the doctor said, "you're normal. The cancer is not discernable".
	Now, 13 of the original 10 to 20 months have passed. Without medical researchers and their amazing chemicals, I would never see another Christmas. However, because of their achievements, I hope to celebrate many Christmases in future. I only wish I could meet those scientists who have given me and countless others so much and say, "Thank you".

Lord Rea: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on obtaining this debate on a subject that other noble Lords have demonstrated is extremely important. Although I was only briefly a full-time academic, I have initiated or taken part in a number of medical research studies over the years. I have also served on several inquiries of your Lordships' Science and Technology Select Committee that touched on medical research. The first was nearly 20 years ago and was on research and development in the National Health Service. It resulted in the appointment of the first director of research and development in 1991. So this topic is not unfamiliar to me, although it has required some homework to absorb recent developments.
	The basis of my remarks will be the Department of Health document Best Research for Best Health, which was published in January this year, and two articles in the current British Medical Journal. The Department of Health's document is very positive and outlines plenty of ideas for the future of medical research in the National Health Service. It preceded the Budget Statement announcing a single medical research budget, but I gather it will slot into that framework—with its pros and possible cons, which have been outlined by my professional and noble friends Lord Turnberg and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy.
	Best Research for Best Health, while very optimistic in tone—a characteristic of government reports, of course—is honest enough to draw attention to some serious difficulties that need to be overcome if its proposals are to become reality. For instance, in the annex, on page 40, it states:
	"Major change within the NHS has left clinicians under great pressure, with training and research too often taking a back seat . . . There has been a decline in the overall number of medical academics from 4,000 in 2001 to only 3,500 today. The number of clinical lecturers has declined by 30 per cent over the same period. Because of other priorities, universities appear reluctant to support those clinical academics that do exist".
	Surely, that is another way of saying that they do not have the money. By way of explanation, the report states that:
	"Between 40 and 50 per cent of clinical academic posts are funded by the NHS rather than by universities".
	It would not be surprising if cash-strapped universities wanted that trend to continue. On this point, I ask my noble friend if the Government intend to fund the expanding number of clinical academics needed for the new strategy through the National Health Service rather than the HEFC? There is little in the report that addresses workforce planning for medical science, a problem emphasised in the briefing that I received from Universities UK for this debate. I am sure that that will be amplified by my noble friend Lady Warwick.
	As my medical and dental academic friends have pointed out today and on other occasions, the number of medical students has continued to increase while the pre-clinical and clinical academic workforce declines. There are plenty of able minds among those entering medical schools who would succeed in a clinical academic career, given the right training. But soon there may be too few clinical scientists to train them to the high standards that we are used to. That has already happened in a few specialities, such as pathology. At the moment, the shortage of doctors opting for careers in research and teaching is largely due to the absence of a clear career pathway. Some of the problems involved have been addressed by suggestions in the Walport report. It would be interesting if the Minister could say whether any progress is being made. The Government must play an increased part and not leave the training of clinical scientists to the medical research charities, excellent though their work has been. I declare an interest in that my son obtained his PhD while he was holding an ICRF clinical fellowship.
	Will the Minister say anything about the new primary care research network proposed in the document? How will this build on current academic general practice units in medical schools or the research support given by the Royal College of General Practitioners? There is rich potential for GPs to become more research-oriented and to acquire the research mindset mentioned by my noble friend. They could also become better trained in epidemiological and clinical research methods. If this network works well, it could be very important, as a huge gain could be had from using the lists held by every general practitioner. That resource is only just beginning to be tapped.
	The two BMJ articles which I mentioned address different but relevant areas. The first, written by a Greek research team, analysed a series of frequently cited medical research papers and found that, during a recent decade, the proportion of industry-funded studies significantly increased in relation to publicly funded studies, particularly randomised drug trials. This occurred although the majority of authors worked in a public/university setting. The authors state:
	"Clinical research"—
	that is, industry-funded clinical research—
	"is dictated by the need to promote products of industry . . . academics may have indeed lost control of the clinical research agenda . . . Many important questions in clinical research have no connections with specific products and thus would not be supported by industry".
	This was alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, in her excellent maiden speech. In other words, it is easier to obtain industry funding for research than it is to obtain public funding, but it comes at a price. This situation is likely to continue owing to the huge imbalance in available research funds between the public sector and industry.
	I shall just skim through the second article. A team led by the London School of Hygiene asked 3,000 people whether privacy was important in gathering information to be used for epidemiological studies. Eighty-eight per cent said that it would not be a problem for them. Only 8 per cent said that it would. Eighty-one per cent said that registration of all cancer cases should be made compulsory as in Scandinavia.
	Concerns expressed about the need for informed consent or anonymity may have reflected the views of a minority. This does not mean that the minority view must not be taken into account, but it suggests that the great majority of the population would not wish excessive attention to confidentiality to interfere with gathering data essential for medical research.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, on a maiden speech which was full of insight and inspiration. She emphasised the need for something for which she is renowned—new and energetic thinking—and from which all of us in this House will benefit.
	I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman on introducing this important debate. I value the opportunity in particular because it gives me a chance to reinforce her point that figures recently published by the Office of Science and Innovation show that, for the first time, the UK research base has outperformed the United States in key areas of the life sciences. That is excellent news. It is a huge area of work for our universities. Here I declare an interest as chief executive of Universities UK.
	Research income relating to clinical medicine accounts for about 30 per cent of all research income to universities—nearly £700 million in 2003–04. Of that, 47 per cent is income from charity-funded research and 7 per cent from business and industry.
	Just two weeks ago we debated investment in R&D in this House. It is clear that we have a long way to go in stimulating business investment in R&D, but the one success story, referred to many times in the debate, is research funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Another huge contributor has been charities involved in medical research.
	There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, we should be doing all we can to encourage other sectors to engage, but, on the other, we cannot afford to be complacent about maintaining our attractiveness to investors in research in health-related fields.
	So there are several issues we need to keep a close eye on. Many issues have been raised in this debate, not least clinical academic numbers, but I will deal with just two. The first relates to full economic costing. The Government already pay 80 per cent of the full economic cost of research funded through the research councils. That is very welcome and is moving the UK research base back towards financial sustainability. However, a very large proportion of research, particularly in health and medicine, is funded by charities, which generally do not pay full economic costs, for reasons we understand, although Universities UK is in discussions with the Association of Medical Research Charities about that.
	Meanwhile, the Government have taken the very welcome step of setting up the Charities Research Support Fund, a funding stream directed through the funding councils as part of quality-related core funding set up to address the issue and to support charitable research through partnership. This is a very positive and helpful development, but we may need to look at how we can develop this further.
	Secondly, the Government announced plans as part of this year's Budget to ring-fence the Department of Health's research and development budget and create a single health research fund of at least £1 billion per year. My noble friend Lord Turnberg and other noble Lords expressed caution about this, but in my view it could offer the opportunity to develop more effective focused structures to support world-class health research.
	While the redistribution of funding may be destabilising in the short term, I have been reassured that the Government are committed to minimising that destabilisation. Universities UK is engaged in discussions with the Department of Health about how this will work in practice. I do not intend to dwell on the detail; however, I add one question to the various others raised on this issue today: has the Minister any comment on how the budgets will be managed, in view of the fact that the NHS R&D budget is an England-only budget, whereas the MRC budget is UK-wide? As the Minister will be aware, some concerns have been expressed that the smaller nations may lose out as a result of this change. I hope that my noble friend can provide some reassurance on that point.
	Of course there will be discussions about how priorities for the new amalgamated budget will be determined. Here I simply lodge my own conviction that the Haldane principle—that individual funding decisions should be independent of government—should be preserved. Again, I would value the Minister's comments on that.
	I should also like to mention one way in which universities are seeking to enhance their international reputation for quality in medical research. Universities UK, with the Department of Health, the higher education funding councils, the MRC, BBSRC, the Wellcome Foundation and other charities, has established the UK Panel for Research Integrity in Health and Biomedical Sciences. This is an important move because the panel's aim is to promote the highest standards in leadership, governance and management in research in these fields, to ensure that a culture of integrity is firmly embedded.
	Fortunately, research misconduct in the UK is rare. However, a further aim of the panel is to develop a register of advisers, making the best expertise and experience available to the research community where there are allegations of misconduct. That is an excellent example of a proactive, university-led initiative to address potential threats to our international reputation for quality in research. I hope that the House will share that view.
	As so many other noble Lords have said, we have much to be proud of in the strength of our medical research base. Its international reputation is hard-won and its contribution to high quality patient care beyond doubt. To preserve that, the Government must ensure that research remains at the heart of the agenda as they pursue NHS reform.
	I happened to see yesterday a press release from the Australian Minister for Health and Ageing, announcing additional investment totalling 905 million Australian dollars a year for health and medical research. I understand that, since 2001, Australian government funding for medical research grants and fellowships has quadrupled. So I end by asking the Minister, in the context of the forthcoming spending review: may we, too, be optimistic of a similar step-change in our Government's level of investment?

Lord Parekh: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Hayman for initiating this extremely important debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, on her splendid contribution to it. I also compliment the Government on supporting a variety of important initiatives in medical research. I have in mind the Department of Health's document Best Research for Best Health. I also have in mind the idea of a single fund for the MRC and NHS health research, announced not long ago as part of the Budget. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, and my noble friend Lord Turnberg have some reservations about that, but I am inclined to share the view of my noble friend Lady Warwick that this may be one way of straddling, or at least undermining, the division that has developed between basic research and clinical research, about which I shall say something shortly. I am also very pleased that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has decided to contribute to medical research £1.2 billion a year from 2008. I especially welcome the appointment of Sir David Cooksey to decide how the money should be used.
	If all those initiatives are to bear results, we need carefully to consider some of the structural problems that medical research seems to face in this country. I do not want to underestimate the enormous amount of research that is taking place, nor the fact that we are at the top among European countries and are second only to the United States. At the same time, there are certain obvious problems. I want to highlight five of them, which I think deserve some attention.
	First, over the years a gap has developed between basic research or discoveries, on the one hand, and clinical research on the other. The recently set-up UK Clinical Research Collaboration, which brings together almost all relevant bodies, is a good initiative on which we need to build. But by itself, it is not enough. Simply throwing together people involved in basic science and clinical research will not generate a catalytic impact unless there is a constant movement between people engaged in clinical research and basic discovery.
	Let us take, for example, someone involved in clinical research on asthma. He or she would benefit enormously from spending time in the universities where physiologists are involved in basic research on animal cells and animal tissues. It is important that basic scientists can effortlessly interact with and move into clinical research, because that is the only way in which the two groups of people engaged in two different kinds of research will be able to sensitise each other. Some interesting ideas on this have been expressed by people such as Professor Colin Blakemore. That deserves attention.
	My second anxiety concerns clinical research itself. There are several reasons why, as several noble Lords have pointed out, clinical research has suffered over the years. There is an unsatisfactory career structure; there is insufficient flexibility in the balance between clinical and academic training; there is a shortage of properly supported staff; and, obviously, as several noble Lords have pointed out, there is the low status of clinical research. Obviously the Government's initiative in having 250 academic clinical fellowships and about 100 clinical lectureship training opportunities is to be warmly welcomed, but my feeling is that this is not enough by itself. We will need more. We will also need to find ways of bringing together clinical researchers in different areas and not simply letting them co-exist side by side. We will also need to attract talented individuals into clinical research because, given its low status, not very bright people tend to be attracted to it. We will also need to find proper career paths and raise the status of clinical research if we are to ensure that it flourishes as well as academic research has done in our country.
	I want to highlight a third problem. The NHS is a wonderful environment for clinical research, but I am not entirely sure that this environment has been fully exploited. Various factors are responsible for this. The research culture in the NHS is rather limited, because the NHS seems to be geared mainly, or at least primarily, to dealing with patients. NHS trust managers are more concerned with their target culture than encouraging a research culture, and we have not devoted sufficient attention to devising incentives so that senior consultants and others do research rather than enter private practice or take early retirement. We would also find it useful to encourage GPs and hospitals doctors to spend time with those engaged in clinical and basic research.
	My own feeling in this connection is that the way in which our medical graduates are trained needs to be looked at. Their training does not involve much research input, unlike at some universities such as Harvard and Yale, where I was privileged to spend some time and where students are encouraged to do both clinical research and a PhD, and where an MD involves not only clinical experience but also academic research. This combination of both research and clinical work is not sufficiently encouraged in our medical schools. Dr Anant Parekh, who is professor of cardiovascular physiology at Oxford University, tells me that, as a professor of medicine, he feels that research would be of enormous benefit if it were somehow incorporated into medical training as it is into the training of social scientists. People going into the NHS or other areas would then already have a research inclination.
	My last point is that, although research is being done in all kinds of areas, we need to devote a little more time to collaborative research than we seem to have done, not only in the European Union but in developing countries. I can see several advantages to this. First—I am speaking here to a Labour Government—it would help us to establish research infrastructures in developing countries. It would outsource part of our work and therefore release our consultants and researchers for other kinds of work. It would also draw on the experiences of doctors and others working in those areas and who therefore have certain sensitive insights into how certain kinds of diseases occur.
	I have a family foundation, and we have been encouraging exchange between doctors and others from Indian universities as well as British ones. It is very striking that these Indian doctors and research scientists bring with them certain intuitions, because they deal with a wide variety of diseases that no longer exist or no longer operate in the same way. These insights could contribute enormously to the kind of work that is being done here.
	I therefore very much hope that, while this enormous amount of money is being injected into medical research—I hope more will be injected—and as we devise new institutional structures, we will attend to some of the significant structural problems.

Lord Winston: My Lords, I want to take issue with a number of things that have been said this afternoon by noble Lords, the first of whom is the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg. Although the life expectancy of some of us might be extended by 30 minutes, whenever I stand up in this Chamber, mine is shortened by at least 30 minutes, even if I am speaking for only five.
	I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman on introducing this very important and timely debate and on her chairmanship of Cancer Research UK during the difficult transitional period which she mastered wonderfully. I absolutely agree with her about its relevance to basic blue skies research. But I fear that at that point I rather take issue with her and I wish to part company, to some extent. At the moment, one problem in research—to which I drew attention in the debate two weeks ago and which we have heard a little about already—is regulation. It is inhibiting blue skies research.
	I told a story two weeks ago about the difficulty in getting a simple project to do stem cell biology through the HFEA, and it being peer reviewed—although on what basis I do not understand. Incidentally, I understand from the HFEA that it was sent out to two peer reviewers. Only one bothered to reply, which was completely inadequate scientifically. We rebutted all the points. That reviewer replied, but did not answer any of our points. That is a disgraceful example of how projects should not be reviewed. I do not understand why, when you are not applying for public funds or trying to publish, it needs to be peer reviewed. One would think that the HFEA should have the expertise in house to deal with a fairly simple project of that kind.
	With due respect, it is interesting that the HFEA keeps saying that it provides the conditions for public confidence. One could argue that having a regulatory authority may raise rather than allay public fears, which is an issue on which I do not think that we have ever done any research. We produce the mantra but we do not have any evidence from social science research one way or the other. It is about time that we did, particularly as the noble Baroness talks about the public understanding of science. It should be the public engagement with science. The public understand the science very well. By and large, they trust what is going on in stem cell biology. There is not much doubt about that, but the issue is whether we have found the right mechanisms for listening to their views.
	One problem is that on taking a consultation based on a website, which the regulatory authority does, you inevitably get skewed opinions. You get people who are representing their opinions from extreme ends—people like myself. I have an interest as someone involved with stem cell biology as a medical researcher and with a spin-out company at Imperial College. On the other side, you will have the people from the right to life movement who have strong views. But the broad public opinion, which is probably largely supportive, will also be largely silent. That is an issue, too, that the noble Baroness rightly raised with regard to animal research. It is sad that it takes so long to get a licence. As I pointed out two weeks ago, it took me 13 months to get a licence to inject six pigs with a completely painless gene construct which caused no damage to the pig.
	I want to come back to a key issue. This House, together with another place, overwhelmingly voted strongly in favour of a very important development in biology; that of stem cell research. The HFEA says—we have heard it said in this Chamber today—that we lead in stem cell biology. That is a little bit of an overstatement. This morning I downloaded all the English publications on human embryonic stem cell research from www.pubmed.co.uk, the medical index. There are now 14 licences on the HFEA website, although it seems to be nine months out of date, so there may be more. I am surprised that it is not updated more regularly. But most of the research projects have not yielded a single publication. Two units have managed 13 publications between them. The others have managed, altogether, just five. The number of publications from this country in stem cell biology, although this is an area in which we should be expert, is less than from Israel or Singapore, both of which have half the population of London. That is not a very impressive record. There is no question that clinicians are inhibited in this country from doing research by the regulatory frameworks. The HFEA is just one example. It happens throughout regulation with regard to ethics approval.
	On the train yesterday I read the April issue of Human Reproduction, the leading and most high-impact journal in my field. That British journal contains some 35 publications, only three of which come from the United Kingdom; the rest are from other countries. That is rather astonishing. In part it may be because of commercial activity in the field, which is a problem, but I think it is also that we are finding it more and more difficult to attract clinicians to clinical research of any kind in this country. I fear that the regulatory framework may have something to answer for. In his speech I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will try to suggest ways in which we might speed up the regulatory framework. I think it is wrong for me to have seen published in Nature only a month ago research that I wanted to do over a year ago, but was not able because I have not been given permission to do it in this country. In the meantime, colleagues have conducted exactly the same experiment in the United States.

Baroness Barker: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for giving us this timely opportunity to discuss a very important subject. I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, to your Lordships' House. Her remarks about public health, in particular on research into ageing issues, were extremely interesting. I look forward to her participation in future debates.
	Every day my school bus passed a building that had probably been a Victorian workhouse or fever hospital. No one paid much attention to it until 1978 when it became the centre of the world's attention. In that year it was where Louise Brown—to give her the full title: Louise Brown the first test-tube baby—was born. She was not born in Cambridge or London—I say in passing to the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy—and she was not born in America. Rather she was born in Oldham, with a clear view of the pitch at Boundary Park. It is a source of ongoing pride to the people of Oldham that she was born there and that her birth took place in an NHS hospital. Just why and how the remarkable team of Edwards and Steptoe created that remarkable breakthrough I leave for noble Lords to read in the forthcoming book of the noble Lord, Lord Winston.
	Some 25 years on, it is right to assess the position of our country as the place where brilliant scientists have the freedom to make breakthroughs. That we are able to do so is due in part to the quality of our academic institutions, the strength of our regulatory framework—although I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Winston, had to say—and the freedom we give researchers to pursue knowledge without unwarranted interference from religious or political interests. I mention religious interests because researchers are now coming from the United States to work here because of intrusions by some religious organisations. As noble Lords have said throughout the debate, the NHS provides a marvellous base on which to conduct epidemiological public health research.
	The announcement of the review by Sir David Cooksey is welcome in that it offers the potential to reduce fragmentation of funding and bureaucracy, the dual nightmare of researchers, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, pointed out. It also promises a review of the research assessment evaluation exercise. In our debate on 27 April many noble Lords observed that it is so laborious and expensive that it acts as a curb on much research. However, the Treasury announcement begs a number of questions, and we should pose them in the run-up to the Comprehensive Spending Review.
	First, it would appear from the documentation that the DfES is not a part of this review—it does not appear in any of the press releases or briefing materials—but, given that academic medicine is such an important part of the whole research package, it really should be included. Fifteen per cent of the R&D performed in UK universities is funded by charities. As the aim of the review is to rationalise medical research funding and maintain the UK's position, it seems rather strange that the DfES is not involved.
	The noble Lord, Lord Rea, spoke eloquently and at some length about the pressures on clinical academic staff. The great concern is that the teaching burden on them is increasing exponentially so that the time available for them to carry out research will not be there. That will not only impact on patient care but, I suspect, it will ultimately impact on the workforce. If our clinical academics do not find that space and time in this country they will go to other places, such as China and India, where they will be given those resources, and we will lose their knowledge and the diversity within the NHS which is one of its greatest strengths.
	The announcement on 31 March stated that the review of Sir David Cooksey is to consider whether some parts of the budget should remain within the relevant government departments. On what basis will that decision be made? There are important questions about the Haldane principle, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, referred, and the need to keep these decisions at arm's length from Ministers.
	The Minister will no doubt be aware that many of the medical research charities are concerned that the Department of Health funding will not be ring fenced. There is a further concern that, in the merged fund, research that has a greater commercial potential will flourish at the expense of research of a more theoretical nature or research which is more complex or longer term.
	I remember talking to one of my colleagues who, on becoming a lecturer at Cambridge, found himself having dinner with a number of his colleagues, among whom there were two Nobel Prize winners. Everyone was making a great deal of one of them but said nothing about the other. My friend asked, "He has just won the Nobel Prize, why aren't people making a fuss of this guy?"—to which he got what I gather is the standard answer at Cambridge, "Well, it is not maths, is it?".
	As many noble Lords have said today, it will be in fields which are not directly related to medicine that some of our biggest advances will come. Can the Minister tell the House whether the current review will address the concern about commercial drivers for research and, if so, how?
	As we discuss this matter, the courts are delivering their verdict on the animal rights activists who terrorised the Hall family in Derbyshire. I am a passionate believer in the right of people to practise animal research and the need for it to happen. Computer modelling, epidemiology, cells, tissues, imaging, screening and clinical trials are all alternatives to animal research. As the law currently stands, animal experiments cannot go ahead if the research can be carried out without animals and each laboratory that conducts animal research has an ethical review process. However, at present it is not possible to recreate the interplay of vital organs, the workings of the immune system or the likely toxic effects of a new medicine in non-animal experiments alone.
	It is imperative that in the review we maintain our support for those who are involved in the legitimate pursuit of the development of knowledge which will alleviate human suffering. Given that GSK had to go to court on Tuesday to protect its shareholders, what further steps, in addition to the legislation last year, will the Government take to ensure that life sciences research organisations are not intimidated out of existence in this country?
	It is widely recognised that gene therapy and drug development offer the greatest potential for treatment of conditions such as cancer. There is frustration within the medical research community that the NICE review process for medicines and medically assisted technologies is laborious and long. Yet if one listens carefully, there is widespread agreement that NICE, although far from perfect, independent as it is, is absolutely necessary to the integrity of scientific development. The alacrity with which the Secretary of State gave in to the campaign for Herceptin several months ago, a drug for which Roche had not even applied for a licence, was alarming. It did enormous harm to the standing of NICE. In this review of best practice, what role will NICE have in gathering together the scientific evidence base and will this present an opportunity, once again, for the Government to support NICE and its efforts?
	A number of noble Lords talked about the potential fracturing of research within the NHS because of the full-scale upheaval going on. We do not yet know whether PCT reorganisation and practice-based commissioning will have a beneficial or a detrimental effect. What steps will the Minister's department take, along with the Department of Health, to ensure that research, specifically in specialist areas such as neurology and audiology, do not slip away and become lost as the big medical issues with the high profile and the popular image take over what limited resources there may be.
	Finally, I return to that Victorian building in Oldham. It is still there today, although it is part of bigger PFI premises. It is part of the Pennine Care NHS Trust which announced last week that 800 jobs are about to go in 400 hospitals, of which the Royal Oldham is one. I really wonder whether it would now be possible for a brilliant team, such as the one that was there in 1978, to appear, and with co-ordination, vision, flexibility and understanding, to produce such a momentous breakthrough as happened then. Whatever else comes from this reorganisation, I sincerely hope that we will remain a country in which brilliant scientists have the space and the wherewithal to do brilliant things.

Earl Howe: My Lords, I am only too glad to echo the comments of other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, on an excellent maiden speech and thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for tabling a Motion on a subject of unusual importance. It is important not only for the well-being of patients but also, as we have heard, for any claim that we may have in this country to regard ourselves as a world-class force for progress in the medical sciences. There is so much to which we could point to validate such a claim: the standing of our universities in world league tables; the continuing keenness by pharmaceutical companies to maintain and build their research capacity in the UK rather than elsewhere; the vibrancy of our medical research charities, which account for at least 15 per cent of our R&D spend; the constant stream of medical advances which this country has pioneered over many years; and the NHS itself, as a platform for research. All these are rightly to be celebrated and nurtured.
	I feel able, at the opposition Dispatch Box, to acknowledge that there are areas in which the Government can hardly be faulted. I refer to their commitment to increasing the medical research budget year by year in the MRC and NHS and in securing broad agreement on how best to encapsulate the ethical underpinning of research in recent legislation. In measuring how high this country jumps in terms of medical science and research, we are lucky enough to begin with the bar set high, with a shared purpose to achieve the same successful outcomes.
	Ready as we may be to trumpet our successes, however, a debate such as this is, if nothing else, an opportunity to look closely at those aspects of our system that are working less well and where we may be falling short. The first issue I want to focus on is regulation. It is generally agreed by those in the research field, as well as on all sides in Parliament, that a strong regulatory framework for conducting basic and clinical research is indispensable. However, we are hearing from the medical community an ever-growing threnody that the burden of regulation has now reached the point where it is obstructively and unreasonably deterring doctors and university departments from initiating research programmes. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, has spoken about that today very eloquently, as he did on 27 April. Unfortunately he is not alone.
	There is the serious issue of multiple approvals for clinical trials, which, thank goodness, the Government look as though they are now addressing. Two years ago in this House we debated the Clinical Trials Regulations. We wondered then whether the persistence of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in trying to minimise the most burdensome effect of the directive would in practice prove fruitful. If we had doubts about that, we are now seeing them borne out.
	Take cancer. Two months ago an editorial in the BMJ reported randomised trials of a new anti-cancer agent as follows:
	"The Directive requires reporting of all suspected serious adverse events, regardless of whether they are caused by the underlying disease, chemotherapy or the investigational drug. Information on each such adverse event needs to be distributed globally to all investigators working on the molecule. The co-ordinating investigator has already received 219 faxes, each consisting of between two and 36 pages. The Directive also requires that each event is reported to local ethics committees, together with an ethical evaluation. So far these have been discussed in 14 sessions of the Tampere ethics committee".
	That situation is being replicated up and down the country. The result is that the cost of conducting non-commercial clinical trials has risen dramatically. The business of managing authorisations requires more staff; insurance and indemnity costs go up; the cost of submissions to research ethics committees go up and so do the costs of pharmacovigilance. We get to the point where, for many investigator-initiated projects, the cost of regulation consumes the money allocated to do the research. If we are not careful, the flow of new therapies will simply dry up, especially those that, because of their complexity, pharmaceutical companies find unattractive.
	The answer is not to throw money at these problems. I found myself, in common with others, bemused by the Chancellor's announcement that the budgets of the MRC and for NHS research were to be merged. The announcement was made without any prior consultation, and one has to wonder what lies behind it. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, set out several concerns, as did others. If it is intended as an oblique means of shifting significant money away from basic research and into translational research, I, with others, would want to sound a loud warning. Even if that is not the intention, it could be the effect. Translational research is vital, but we de-emphasise basic research at our long-term peril. We wish Sir David Cooksey well as he reviews these matters in the context of the strategy set out in Best Research for Best Health.
	I want to touch now on an issue that I do not think has been mentioned. No science base worth its name is possible without children at school pursuing science subjects to A-level and through to university, and without a sufficient supply of science graduates to teach them. The warning signals have been plain for a number of years now that we are simply not getting enough children to take up science seriously. In the past 20 years the number of pupils taking A-level physics has declined by 35 per cent The supply of physics teachers is diminishing with alarming rapidity, and nearly a third of them are in their 50s.
	What is to be done? The announcements in this year's Budget of a programme of recruitment of new science teachers and of extra money for schools science were, of course, decidedly welcome. But if we look at what has gone wrong with this part of the school curriculum, we have to confront some pretty stark and unpleasant truths. Last summer the Oxford and Cambridge RSA did a survey of teenage children about their views on science lessons. Ninety-three per cent of them said that they did not regard science or scientists as being "cool". Over half thought that science lessons were "boring and confusing". When Save British Science did a survey recently, it found that in more than three-quarters of secondary schools, science practicals had been cancelled, and that by far the most common reason given for that was the rowdy behaviour of pupils. In fact, bad behaviour was seen as the single biggest problem for the teaching of science subjects, far above lack of equipment or class sizes. That poses a question mark over standards of discipline maintained in the classroom, but there is another question mark over the content of the syllabus. Dr Martin Stephen, High Master of St Paul's, recently voiced his view that the attempts to make science GCSEs more relevant had left them "unchallenging and uninspiring". He said:
	"The new GCSEs are to real science what baby food is to steak and chips. They will bore the pants off many students, not inflame them with a new love of science".
	Dr Stephen is by no means alone in these opinions.
	The message here is surely that more money for schools science, although very welcome, may not be the most important ingredient in the revival of science that we all want to see in this country. The danger is severalfold. A number of universities are making cutbacks in their science and medical departments. That not only leads to the erosion of particular disciplines in their own right but also has a damaging effect on the ability of a university to maintain cross-disciplinary excellence, which my noble friend Lord Colwyn did so well to mention, as did the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya.
	Pharmaceutical companies are finding it increasingly hard to source home-grown science graduates with good degrees. The key issue here is the quality of graduates. Funding from award councils that has nominally been allocated for teaching medical students is calculated on the number of students being taught, as opposed to any real measure of the teaching quality. The incentives to provide the high-quality teaching essential for research are therefore lacking. One manifestation of that is the shortage of clinical academics. I do not propose to spend time speaking about that because, serious as the problem is—and it is extremely serious—not too long ago we had a very fruitful debate on that very subject, led by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg. If there is an overriding key message that I would pick out it is that universities must not just be places where students are taught; they must also be centres of academic excellence. Without fostering and maintaining those centres of excellence, we are into a downward spiral in which the business of attracting and retaining good people, both to learn and to teach, will become ever harder. Indeed, that was the theme of the excellent debate about universities initiated by my noble friend Lord Patten on 27 April.
	For our science base to thrive, and for the UK to hold its own internationally in that sense, the expertise of our university faculties, pursuing learning and inquiry for their own sake, must be the benchmark we use above all others to measure success.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Hayman for introducing this debate. We all appreciate her great personal interest in and commitment to this area. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, on her excellent maiden speech. It had everything that we admire in this House—expert knowledge, clarity of thought, and passion—and we look forward to many similar speeches of such quality in the future. I am also very grateful to the other contributors to the debate. I was very moved by the speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady O'Cathain, and my noble friend Lord Acton setting out their personal experiences. It is important that people do communicate these messages, because at the end of the day that is enormously important in encouraging researchers and showing the public how important this area of research is.
	The UK is a world leader in both industrial and academic medical research. The Government believe that it is a major national asset which should be strongly supported. That is why we have steadily increased funding to the Medical Research Council, whose budget has risen from £289.1 million in 1997–98 to £480.8 million in 2005–06, which represents an increase of 72 per cent I assure the noble Baroness, Lady O'Cathain, that we will continue to give full support to medical research in the future.
	I echo a number of speakers in the debate who said that UK university research in this area has an outstanding record. We remain strong internationally in terms of achievement, productivity and efficiency. The latest report of the Office of Science and Innovation shows that in the fields of preclinical and health research we rank second only to the USA, with a 12 per cent world share of citations, and in the field of biological and clinical sciences we have a 10 per cent share of citations. As someone pointed out, for a country with 1 per cent of the world's population doing 5 per cent of the world's science, that is an extremely good performance.
	It is also true that research funded by the MRC has led to some of the most significant discoveries and achievements of 20th century medicine. For example, Watson and Crick were based in an MRC unit in Cambridge when they made their discovery of the structure of DNA. Monoclonal antibodies have revolutionised biomedical research and sparked an international billion-pound biotechnology industry. The original techniques were devised in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Again, it is clear that we have world-class research, but it is worth focusing on those two discoveries, because they have revolutionised medical research. They were both absolutely based on fundamental basic research, and one needs to always keep that relationship in mind.
	Translating the results of basic research into direct clinical and economic benefits is also of key importance. The MRC's strategy for doing so ranges from support for experimental medicine to funding clinical trials and other population level studies. Translational research needs a vigorous exchange of ideas, methods, people and priorities between basic and clinical sciences, which the MRC actively promotes. In January 2006, it launched a call for centre grant applications to strengthen translational research in the UK. Some 22 applications were received, and the awards will be made in the autumn.
	Collaboration with industry is another important area for the translation of basic science into economic and medical benefits. The MRC does this through MRC Technology Ltd, which is responsible for exploiting the intellectual property rights from research in MRC research establishments. Between 1987 and 2004, the MRC received more than £102 million in income from exploitation of its intellectual property rights and granted around 457 licences. The MRC's commercial income was £28.5 million in 2004–05 and expenditure on commercialisation was £9.3 million. This level of licence income is equivalent to 9 per cent of research expenditure in MRC institutes and units which, on the basis of the most recent comparative figures available, is more than three times the proportion achieved overall by US universities and around 15 times the level in UK universities. I am also glad that my noble friend Lady Hayman drew attention to the fact that the quality of our medical research is a key factor in helping to keep world-class pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries in this country.
	We are rightly proud of the past achievements of the Medical Research Council and we want to build on those. We also want to build on another huge advantage that the UK has in the translation of research into the clinic: the National Health Service. The NHS has a key role to play in determining the future health and wealth of this country and the Government are determined to harness its capacity to make the UK the best place in the world for health research, development and innovation. The Government's new strategy for NHS research in England, Best Research for Best Health, aims to create a health research system that supports outstanding individuals, working in world-class facilities, conducting leading-edge research that is focused on the need of patients and the public. The NHS also provides researchers with potential access virtually to the entire population, through an integrated system of primary, secondary and tertiary care. This is a unique selling point for public sector researchers, charities and private sector organisations.
	Acting on reports from the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Bioscience Innovation and Growth Team, the Government created the UK Clinical Research Collaboration in 2004. It is a partnership of organisations, bringing together the National Health Service, research funders, industry and other stakeholders to develop joint actions to support clinical research in the UK and exploit the potential of the NHS more effectively. The UKCRC has had a successful first 18 months and has shown that the Government, working in partnership with the pharmaceutical, bioscience and healthcare industries, can not only increase communication and co-ordination between key stakeholders, but make things happen. I am glad that my noble friend Lady Hayman drew attention to what I think is a success story.
	More can be done, and at the time of the Budget, as noble Lords have mentioned, the Chancellor announced a single jointly held health research fund. The aim is to maximise the impact of the MRC's funded medical research and the Department of Health's R&D. It will build on the UK's world-class medical science base and recent developments such as the development of the UKCRC and the Government's new strategy for R&D in England, Best Research for Best Health. It has enormous potential.
	As noble Lords have pointed out, deciding on the best institutional arrangements for public funding of health research is difficult. Sir David Cooksey will be leading the review which will advise Government on the best way to take this forward. Perhaps I may say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, that, knowing Sir David very well, too, I am sure that we shall see some new and energetic thinking, which will be conducted extremely well. The noble Baroness, Lady O'Cathain, was slightly optimistic about the date. I hate to be in the position of suggesting that it may be a bit later, but the timetable will be slightly longer than the noble Baroness suggested. However, I am sure that Sir David Cooksey will complete the task as quickly as possible. He launched the consultation on 4 May, the details of which can be found on the Treasury website. I hope very much that the medical and clinical research communities will contribute strongly to that consultation.
	I wish to make clear that there is no intention in this move to alter in any way the balance between basic and applied research. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, that what we want to do is not to change the balance but to make the research more effective. At least some people feel strongly that National Health Service R&D has been used to fund all sorts of infrastructure issues and that it is sometimes hard to see where the actual research has been carried out. We think that we can make this research more effective. I am sure that it will be carried out on the basis of excellence and relevance, not on geopolitical grounds. I should also tell the noble Baroness that there is no plan to cut the £1.3 million. The Cooksey review will look at whether the totality of £1.38 million should be included in a single budget, or whether there is still a case for some of that remaining with the National Health Service and be very much focused on the policy issues that it needs to address.
	There is certainly no intention of altering the Haldane principle. It is something that we all approve of—very strongly in my case. It is fundamental. However, when I asked my civil servants recently who Lord Haldane, the person who introduced the principle, was and where it was written down, no one was able to find out. The answer is that it is not Lord Haldane the scientist but Lord Haldane the Cabinet Minister. However, it is a principle that we all accept, and it is in the 1980 report on the machinery of government. It is a very good idea and we totally support it.
	Another fundamental issue raised during the debate was the question of regulation. I agree with my noble friend Lady Hayman that we have to get better at a key aspect of this—that is, working in Europe to make certain that any regulation that comes from there is sensibly drafted so that it does not cause us problems.
	My noble friends Lord Turnberg and Lord Winston talked eloquently about the restrictions that they feel are hindering research. The Department of Health is aware of this problem and I agree that there is an issue here. I shall be meeting my noble friend Lord Winston to see whether there is any way in which changes can be made to ensure that we get good regulation. We do not want to get rid of regulation—good regulation is fundamental—but there is a difference between regulation and bureaucracy. The latter achieves nothing other than to hold up important work that needs to be done.
	I cannot agree with the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, that our IP policies, or the Patent Office policies, are in any way holding up the exploitation of our research. They are very similar to those in the United States. We make certain that all the IP goes to the people who carry out the research, which is what happened in the Bayh-Dole Act in America. I know of no cases where it is felt that we have problems in that area.
	The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, raised the question of research into mental health problems in prisons. I am very glad to hear that in my absence my charitable trust, the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, is continuing to do good things. Unless things have changed in my absence, I assure the noble Lord that the charity is very keen to do research but it does so only if it leads to policy changes. Unless that has changed while I have been away, that will continue to be the case.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, and my noble friends Lord Rea and Lord Parekh raised the important area of clinical excellence. This area has been neglected in the past but, due to some excellent work by Mark Wolpert of the Wellcome Trust, there is now a real focus on solving the problems there. One problem is the length of the training that people have to undergo if they are to do clinical research. They have to get the qualifications that a researcher would have—that is, a PhD—and then they need the clinical experience that a clinician would have. That means that only very late in their lives do people get to do any clinical research, and there are very uncertain career prospects after that. Mark Wolpert has done some excellent work on this and the issue is now being focused on. I think that we can raise it up as it is an area that has been neglected and we need to do something about it.
	My noble friend Lord Parekh also raised some other important and interesting ideas concerning the clinical area. I shall certainly read in Hansard what he said and give it some thought.
	My noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya raised the question of a council for technology, but I would be rather against that. We now have the Technology Strategy Board and the technology programme. Those are clearly focused on what they should be doing—that is, applied research and research carried out in collaboration with industry, with a clear focus on competitive advantage. It is very difficult to do both applied and basic research within one organisation. It is much better if they are carried out by different bodies as they are managed and evaluated in different ways.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, raised the question of MRC money being on a UK basis and National Health Service money being on an English basis. That is exactly the kind of problem and snag that we have asked Sir David Cooksey to help us with. The noble Baroness also asked whether we could expect to see a greater increase in medical research in the comprehensive spending review. As she will know very well, there are two answers to that. If it were my decision, the answer would be "yes", but the official government response would be "wait and see".
	My noble friend Lord Rea asked whether clinical researchers will continue to be funded by the NHS. I believe that discussions are taking place between the Department of Health and the Higher Education Funding Council for England to secure how best to make certain that that funding is made.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, raised the question of animal rights extremists. We have done a lot both on the legislative front and in terms of forming a special police unit under assistant chief constable Anton Setchell in 2004 to take a national view of the issue. I think that after some considerable time the unit is now beginning to get on top of this problem. A lot of prosecutions are now taking place. There is still a lot to do but the Oxford biomedical facility will be built. Is it encouraging to see young people taking a stand in favour of scientific progress. Scientists are now speaking up about the vital work they do, and ordinary individuals are signing up through the people's petition to express how vital they believe that work is.
	The noble Earl, Lord Howe, raised a key question: the supply of young creative scientists. The position on young scientists in this country is much better. Indeed, it is very good, both compared with the past and compared with other countries. The question of people turning away from science and engineering is an almost universal problem. It includes Japan, Germany, South Korea, and so on. In this country, the figures show that the number of first degrees obtained in SET subjects grew by 43 per cent between 1994–95 and 2003–04. That includes very strong growth in subjects allied to medicine and biological sciences. The growth in PhDs in 2004 compared with 1994–95 is 88 per cent The situation at undergraduate level is rather good. Surprisingly the percentage of the total undergraduate population taking science degrees has gone up rather than down.
	I agree that there is a problem at A-level. I do not think that that is all to do with disruption by pupils. The question of the qualifications of teachers is enormously important. Far too many young people are taught physics and chemistry by people who do not have relevant qualifications. We have taken some strong steps to change that in terms of conversion and getting new people in. We have taken another extremely important decision, which is to make certain that the very brightest children can do triple science, which has not always happened in the past and also appears to correlate with how well people do at A-level.
	I was pleased that my noble friend Lord Haskel raised the question of knowledge transfer networks. We now have 18 such networks, which are doing extremely well in a diverse range of fields. We have always said that we do not have intermediate organisations for translating basic research into helping industry. We now have 18 in important modern areas, which are proving very successful.
	This has been an important debate, which has highlighted both the strength of Britain's medical research and its contribution to society as a whole. This country's future medical research depends on making the best use of highly talented people and the unique potential of the National Health Service as a platform for clinical research to bring benefits to patients. The extra funds that the Government have given to medical research, the action that we are taking to improve our funding system and the translation of basic research into clinical and economic benefits demonstrate the Government's support for this great national asset.

Baroness Hayman: My Lords, there remains a single moment for me to thank all noble Lords who have participated in today's debate, to echo the congratulations of the whole House to the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie, on an outstanding maiden speech, and to comment perhaps on how timely is the proposal before your Lordships' House on setting up a committee on regulators. Perhaps I may even suggest that my noble friend Lord Winston should join it. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Economic Migration (EUC Report)

Lord Wright of Richmond: rose to move, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on economic migration to the EU (14th Report, HL Paper 58).

Lord Wright of Richmond: My Lords, in moving the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, with your Lordships' leave I shall speak also to the second Motion standing in my name.
	In opening this double debate on two reports produced by Sub-Committee F of the EU Select Committee, I first pay tribute to the invaluable contribution of all my colleagues on the sub-committee which, for our second report, included the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, as a co-opted member. I also express my thanks to our two successive clerks, Tony Rawsthorne and Michael Collon, and for the expert help we received from our specialist advisers and staff.
	Both these reports deal with a subject receiving much attention at present: immigration. Although the title of our second report refers to illegal migrants, this has nothing to do with the current controversy over the deportation or non-deportation of foreign criminals, let alone Afghan hijackers. Indeed, our committee considered whether we should not adopt the preferred title of "irregular migrants"—people who have overstayed their visas, or whose application for political asylum had been turned down and who must return, voluntarily or compulsorily, to their home countries. We decided nevertheless to retain "illegal migrants" in the title, since that is the term adopted in the Commission draft directive scrutinised by our report.
	First, on our report on economic migration to the EU, I am sorry that it has taken so long to find time to debate a report which was issued in mid-November last year. Having re-read it in the past few days, however, I have concluded that it is still as relevant as it was six months ago. Indeed, in the aftermath of some worrying indications of xenophobia in the results of last week's local elections, it is as timely as it then was to draw attention to the main conclusions of our report: that economic migration by third-country nationals is important to the economies of the EU member states and, most particularly, to the economy of the United Kingdom; that such migration needs to be regulated in the interests of all concerned parties; and that, because of the diversity of labour market needs and requirements, the detailed criteria governing it should remain the responsibility of member states.
	I hope that noble Lords will have had an opportunity to study this important report in detail. I look forward to hearing the Minister's response to this debate, but am glad to tell the House that the Government's written response to this report was generally positive. Although they agreed with our conclusion that there is little to fear and much to gain from the extension of freedom of movement rights to the new member states, this appears not to have been the conclusion of those of our European partners who have recently decided to extend for another two years the period during which nationals of the new accession states will remain banned from the right of free migration into their countries, or will have that right severely curtailed.
	The Government's written response also agreed with our conclusion that economic migration from outside the present EU would continue to be needed, and that it is not possible to set an overall limit for net migration. We endorse the Government's view that national economic considerations should remain the primary determinant of the level of economic immigration, provided that this is not at the expense of the interests of the sending countries or, of course, of the migrants themselves.
	Where the Government differed from the recommendations of our report was over the extent to which they participate in EU immigration and asylum policy. I shall come to our view of the Government's decision not to opt in to the directive on an EU returns policy. But our first report concluded—and this is not the first time that my sub-committee has made this point—that it is damaging to our national interests to be seen as only partially engaged in this important area of policy. Although we received complimentary comments from several of our witnesses in Brussels on the effective negotiating skills of our permanent representation to the EU, many of them argued that our semi-detached attitude to community immigration policies was damaging not only to Britain's image in the community but to our real national interests.
	On three other points in our first report, I must register our disappointment at the Government's response. When she comes to close this debate, I hope that the Minister might give us some hope of flexibility in the Government's attitude to these issues. The first is our recommendation that the Government should commission research into the likely costs and consequences of acceding to the United Nations convention on the protection of migrant workers. The second is our hope that the Government might reconsider the case for acceding to the Council of Europe convention on migrant workers. The third is that we urge the Government to opt in to the long-term residents directive and the family reunification directive.
	I now turn to our second, more recent, report which consists of an inquiry into a Commission proposal for the adoption of common standards regulating the return of illegally staying third-country nationals. I hope that noble Lords will not have been deterred by the sheer bulk of this report. Had I realised that combining the report and all the evidence would produce such a large volume, I think I would have suggested that they might have been produced in two volumes. The Government have not yet had time to respond in writing to this report, although Ministers from the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs all gave oral evidence to our committee.
	As I have already explained, the title of the second report should not mislead the House into thinking that this proposal has any connection with the current controversy about the deportation of foreign criminals, although I am grateful to my noble friend Lady D'Souza for drawing your Lordships' attention to this report when the then Home Secretary's statement was repeated in this House last week. The migrants to whom our report refers are, for the most part, overstayers. They are unlikely to have been convicted of a criminal offence and one of our concerns, following our committee visit to Yarl's Wood detention centre, was that the conditions of detention and removal should, as far as possible, avoid any implication that these migrants are being held in prison or treated as criminals. One striking fact was brought to our attention; namely, that a large group of "illegally staying third-country nationals" in Australia are British gap-year students who have overstayed their conditions of entry. Our report therefore makes it clear that the directive deals with widely differing categories of persons, some of whom will have entered the EU legally and resided there legally.
	As for the need for a directive, we found a widespread view in Brussels and among many of our witnesses that any policy for the return of illegal migrants should remain an internal matter for member states and that the draft was unlikely to receive much support, at least in its present form. We therefore had some sympathy for the Government's decision not to opt in to this directive, in spite of our view, to which I have already referred, that the Government should avoid taking a semi-detached attitude to community immigration policies. Nevertheless, we have urged the Government—and I hope that the Minister will give us some comfort in her response—to involve themselves closely and positively in trying, as far as their opt-out will allow, to improve the directive in the ways recommended in our report. It may be that the directive will never see the light of day. It certainly does not seem to have aroused much enthusiasm on the part of the Austrian presidency, but the draft has given my committee the opportunity to look into some important aspects of our returns policy and I hope that our recommendations will be given the serious attention that they deserve.
	I shall leave it to others to expand on different aspects of these reports. In general, we had some sympathy with the Commission's attempt to formulate common EU procedures and standards for returning illegal migrants to their countries of origin, but we were frankly disappointed by the draft directive as it stands, which seemed to us to be a missed opportunity. It nevertheless gave us the chance to examine more closely the practice in this country and in some other member states. Those who have no right to live here should be returned to their countries of origin, but it is important that this process should be undertaken humanely and with dignity. We have concerns that the Commission's proposals as they stand, being a compromise between the best and the worst, may result in a lowering of standards in some member states.
	Detention pending removal was of particular concern to our committee. Although we found that the conditions in this country are better than some elsewhere, there is no room for government complacency. In particular, we were shocked to discover that the Home Office still fails to keep statistics on how long individuals have been in detention. This has been a constant theme of debates on the Government's immigration legislation, yet it appears that nothing has been done about it. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that measures are now in hand to review this failure. We also argue that the Government should improve UK rights of appeal against return decisions in line with the draft and should introduce regular, judicial oversight of administrative detention decisions.
	I have already referred to our hope that the Government, in spite of their opt-out, will play an active part in trying to improve the main defects in the draft directive. We argue also that the Commission should put more resources into negotiating readmission agreements with third countries and that the Council of Europe guidelines on forced return should be given statutory force. I am proud to commend both these reports to the House. I beg to move.
	Moved, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on economic migration to the EU (14th Report, HL Paper 58).—(Lord Wright of Richmond.)

Lord Dubs: My Lords, I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Wright, said about the enormous help that we received from the staff who served our committee so well in the two inquiries. I also pay tribute to him for the way in which he took the chair at our meetings and steered us through with a combination of firmness and good humour to the conclusions which are before us today.
	In May 2004, 10 countries joined the EU. We supported the Government's policy of admitting migrants for the purposes of work from the 10 countries, in particular the eight former communist countries. According to figures we received, 232,000 people came to Britain from those eight countries. Many of them were already in the UK before the date—we estimate some 30 per cent Poles made up the largest number, followed by Lithuanians. It is no surprise that those two countries have the highest unemployment rates among the eight.
	The figures for those coming to Britain were greater because most other EU countries said no to them. Our employment rate at the time—that is, about a year ago—was 4.6 per cent, which was about half that of France and Germany, so there were attractions for people coming to seek work in Britain. I am delighted that some of the other EU countries have now opened their doors—Finland, Greece, Spain and Portugal—and I hope that the others will follow.
	It is very clear from the work of the committee that the 230,000 or so people who came to Britain were of enormous benefit to the British economy. They contributed to our GDP; they contributed to filling vacancies in the job market; and virtually none has claimed social security benefits. Indeed, a condition of their coming to work here greatly limited the benefits that they could claim. It is unlikely that the movement from those countries to Britain will continue at the earlier levels as unemployment falls and the economies improve in the new countries.
	Romania and Bulgaria will, I hope, join the EU next January—if not then, they will do so a year later. I hope that our Government will also extend an open door to those two countries so that their nationals can come here for work, and I very much hope that our EU partners will follow suit.
	Perhaps I may now turn to the second report on proposals for a common EU returns policy on what are called illegal immigrants. I am not happy about the word "illegal", but that is part of the Brussels terminology. Any policy that is to be fair to migrants and asylum seekers also has to deal with those who have arrived here and did not qualify to stay. As regards asylum seekers, I believe firmly that the integrity of the 1951 convention on refugees must mean that those who have not been able to make a successful claim should not be able to stay—otherwise the whole policy is undermined—provided that there have been fair and proper procedures for asylum determination with rights of appeal against an adverse decision.
	Removing people is always a difficult and painful process for a liberal democracy, and I want to reflect on some of the findings in our report. The Commission proposals should to my mind have been a way of raising standards throughout the EU. The noble Lord said that in this they have sometimes failed. Proposals that are a compromise between the practices of the various member states allow the best to lower their standards. It was notable that in many respects British practice was better than that in some EU countries.
	Clearly, the policy will work best and humanely if voluntary returns are encouraged. Four weeks' detention is probably too short a period—and it might be preferable not to have a time limit at all—but six months' detention is surely too long and will simply encourage some countries to lengthen their detention periods.
	Let me now turn to the question of detention and our visit to Yarl's Wood. We were not able to look at the detention policies of other EU countries, but the lessons we learnt at Yarl's Wood would surely have a wider application than simply to this country itself. Physically, the conditions were reasonably good. What we saw included a well equipped kindergarten, IT facilities and a gym. The kindergarten in particular had a pleasant, bright atmosphere, with children who seemed to be happy and caring teachers and helpers. In fact, I would like to pay tribute to the staff at Yarl's Wood who seemed altogether to be very dedicated and caring.
	But, unfortunately, there is another side to Yarl's Wood. Coming in, there were some formidable bars at the entrance giving a sense of imprisonment. There was a yard with some play equipment for children, but as it was raining there were no children there. However, the back of the yard had a high and bleak wall which totally dominated the scene. And even without the wall and the bars at the entrance there was a sense of the many locked doors throughout the premises.
	We had a chance to talk to some of those being held there. Let me reflect a little on what they said. The older children and the adults—I except the very young children—had a sense of complete bewilderment and did not know what was to happen to them or, indeed, when. They were anxious to hear from their lawyers. That sense of bewilderment was a pretty awful reflection on the state they were in. The conditions under which they had first been detained gave me and others a great deal of cause for concern. We were told that at dawn there would be a swoop on their home and that they would be taken away without even enough time to put their belongings together. There was one example of a family from, I believe, Pakistan, with three teenaged children. They were preparing to go to school or to college when the immigration police, or whatever the authorities were, called on them and they were taken away. The family were very passionate about cricket. The younger boy was on the Warwickshire under-14 team and the older boy was also a keen cricketer. They put their savings into buying cricketing equipment, and they did not even have time to get that together. They were in absolute despair. I asked them whether they were keeping fit in the gym. They said that no, they had lost interest.
	Lastly, let me turn to the question of whether there is any need to lock up families with children at all. The report does not quite go so far as to say that, but I shall go a little further than the words of the report. I think that in the case of families with children the risk of absconding is surely small and that the risk to the rest of the community must be virtually negligible. Perhaps a transfer to a home or hostel near the airport of departure would be appropriate, but without the need to lock them up. I repeat: locking up children seems to me to be wrong. I hope that one by-product of the committee's inquiry will be to make the Government think again about this policy of locking up families with children.

Lord Marlesford: My Lords, as a free trader, I believe in the EU not only as a barrier against warring states but especially as a single market for goods, capital and services and the unhindered movement of people. However, the onus must be on the European Commission to demonstrate that its interventions are justified under the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. The Brussels bureaucracy, like all bureaucracies, is tempted to invent jobs and empires for itself and cannot be trusted to apply the tests of necessity with any sort of rigour.
	Some months ago, Günter Verheugen, the German vice-president of the European Commission, told the EU Select Committee that, when attempting to control the bureaucracy that President Barroso had inherited from Mr Prodi, he had found that many senior Brussels bureaucrats saw their role as being to keep up the chauffage of the Commission.
	The demographic background to our report is dramatic. Since 1960, the EU-25 share of the total world population has fallen from 12 per cent to 7 per cent The total fertility rate is among the lowest in the world. None the less, the EU-25 population grew by 77 million between 1960 and 2003, but since 1990, net migration has become the biggest component of that population growth. Throughout our history, Britain has enjoyed—I use the word deliberately—a significant exchange of population with other countries. That has been one of the secrets of our success.
	Our report refers primarily to migration to the EU, rather than within it, but I want to focus on the consequences of enlargement. On that, I want to salute Her Majesty's Government and the Governments of Sweden and Ireland for being the only three who allowed free migration from the 10 from the word go. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, four more have joined that club: Spain, Portugal, Greece and Finland. The remaining eight have renewed barriers for a further two years. This week, I have spent two days in Brussels at a joint parliamentary meeting on the future of Europe and I can tell noble Lords that those barriers to movement are greatly resented.
	The UK open-door policy to immigrants from the new members of the EU demonstrates our credentials as real Europeans better than a decade of protectionist posturing by those countries of old Europe seeking to preserve a non-viable social model. For Britain, that migration has been almost entirely beneficial. Our construction industry would have become an economic bottleneck without the Poles, Lithuanians and others. None the less, immigration into this country still arouses strong and emotional unease. Two causes of that are, I believe, a fear of multiculturalism and a widespread perception that controls on illegal migrants are ineffective.
	First, there is multiculturalism. The UK is of course a multiracial and multiethnic society and has been, to our great advantage, for decades. Europe has for centuries absorbed aspects of other people's cultures. Those influences have forged the nation states that compose the EU. Let us not forget that the great leap forward in the French cuisine came in the 16th century from Italy, with the arrival of Catherine of Medici as Queen of Henry II of France. Unfortunately, for some reason or other, that benefit has not been passed to those staunch allies of France in Scotland.
	The French language is to France as important a part of its culture as the British system of justice is to the UK. Both must be equally respected. One of the great strengths of the United States has always been that those arriving in that country have sought to become Americans. Immigrants do not arrive with their own political, economic or social agenda to change the American way of life. But in Britain, multiculturalism has overtones of political action to modify the values of host nations to accommodate new entrants, even where there is a fundamental conflict between those values. This is what can breed resentment and can lead to the horrors of racism and even to civil strife.
	Let me say a word about certain aspects. My first point is about language. I believe that the considerable resources applied by some local authorities to communicate with immigrants in their own languages should be switched to help them to learn English. It is a priceless economic asset for the UK, and it really should be a major priority for people who come to live here.
	Secondly, immigrants cannot be allowed to import into either the public or private sector the systemic corruption that may in certain cases be entrenched in their own countries. Nor can we tolerate, let alone accommodate, the exploitation of women, whether in their treatment or their status, in the UK. One of the greatest, and growing, evils in migration is the criminal activity of people-trafficking, whether for sexual or economic purposes. The exposure of this has further undermined public confidence in the whole system of immigration control.
	There is no doubt that the failure of the UK returns policy to operate on the scale that the problem demands is a constant stimulus to public anger. Excesses in legal aid and attempts to spin out the judicial appeals system by the often bogus invocation of human rights undermine and thus discredit our underlying sensible, tolerant and humane approach to immigrants. I, too, support the Government for not signing up to the EU draft returns directive. Although I can see the merit of constant exchanges of information—governments should be able to have a dialogue on the policies between the EU and other areas, and the fact that we are not part of the Schengen agreement should not mean that we are not given full Schengen migration information, although we do not get it at the moment—I doubt whether it will ever be sensible to legislate at EU level for a constantly developing situation. Not only is there the risk of a compromise between the worst and the best, but to freeze one pattern in the kaleidoscope imperils the flexibility with which governments are expected by their electorates to deal with such problems.
	Finally, I must say a word about the deplorable failure of the Government to have, or even to be aware that they did not have, an effective system for the deportation of foreign criminals whom the courts have said should be deported. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, knows, because she has signed the Answers, I have since early March been questioning the Government on this issue. Some of the Answers reveal a disgraceful level of concealment of the reality not only from Parliament but from Ministers. At least the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, whom of course I acquit of any connivance in the matter, cannot defend the performance of her department. It is yet another example of the dazzling incompetence of the Home Office.
	All I would predict is that the Prime Minister's enthusiastic advocacy of a fresh and vigorous policy of deportation will not survive the onslaught of the ranks of civil rights lawyers who are at sharpening their claws to attack him.

Lord Maclennan of Rogart: My Lords, in this pre-dinner hour, I cannot resist the provocations of the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, in his Jonsonian aspersions on Scottish cuisine. I commend to him the virtues of cullen skink and cocky leeky—two perfectly delectable soups. But, in so many other matters, I agreed with everything he said.
	We have recently witnessed mass demonstrations by immigrants in the United States of America, protesting against threats of criminal prosecution against them and demanding the right of US citizenship. Most commentators have observed that the contribution of illegal immigrants to the United States' economy—it is estimated that there are some 12 million—has been very positive, and that they have contributed significantly to the competitiveness of the United States.
	Western Europeans have been rather less certain that economic migration benefits their domestic economies. But in the late 1990s, the rate of net migration per 1,000 inhabitants in the old European Union overtook the United States for the first time. It is clear that on both sides of the Atlantic there is a need to manage the migration process to ease the integration of migrants.
	This debate gives us a welcome opportunity to consider ways in which that process can be assisted. I commend the work done by the sub-committee under the distinguished chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wright. That report makes three broad points with which I find myself in agreement. The first is to reaffirm these economic benefits to Britain and our partners of economic migration. In particular, we are reminded that immigrants contribute considerably more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Immigrants may help to compensate for the decline and ageing of Europe's indigenous population and they boost innovation and growth.
	It is a matter of regret that the accession countries—the A8—which are providers of internal European migration at this time, are still playing out long transitional periods before they can enjoy the right to work across the European Union because a number of the larger countries do not share the United Kingdom's perception of the advantages from economic migration. Having said that, it is proper to acknowledge that Germany, in particular, has been host to very substantial numbers of immigrant workers and to note that of the 27 million Turks who went to Germany in the 1960s 25 million returned to Turkey.
	The second committee finding which seems incontrovertible is that the European Union can ameliorate the process of adjustment, although we are warned that there is a need for any common policy to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the national and regional variations of economic circumstances. But, having broadly accepted the views of the Government that national economic consideration should remain the primary determinant of the level of economic immigration, the committee strongly criticises the Government for their partial disengagement from European Union immigration and asylum policy. It is right to criticise the Government's opt out on immigration policy, which would not, in the cases cited in the report, contrary to the Government's assertion, affect their borders policy, which is covered by a quite separate opt out.
	The committee points to Britain's exclusion from useful developments on the External Borders Management Agency (FRONTEX) and the measures relating to the inclusion of biometric identifiers in travel documents. It is understandable that the Government want to be "out" and "in" at the same time, which is very human. But it is unwelcome to our partners, which is equally understandable. If economic migration continues to be managed by national governments, they would do well at least to avoid the distortion of competition by widely different standards of protection for migrant workers. It would be sensible to seek agreement on the guiding principles which should be applied.
	The third broad principle acknowledged by the report with which I am in agreement is the desirability of offering parity of treatment to legal immigrants and to long resident third country nationals. It is in that sphere that the committee offers the sharpest criticism of government policy. Not only are the Government evidently unwilling to ratify the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Protection of Migrant Workers, they are not apparently even willing to commission research into the likely costs and consequences of doing so. That seems stubborn and ostrich-like. Nor are the Government ready to reconsider the case for acceding to the Council of Europe convention on migrant workers, we are told.
	Finally, the Government apparently are not willing to seek to strengthen the rights of the United Kingdom's economic migrants by opting into the family reunification directive and the long-term residents directive enabling those United Kingdom migrants to enjoy equality with economic migrants in the rest of the European Union. That is not good enough.
	The committee report describes the rights secured by these two European Union directives as,
	"critically important to ensuring mobility and equality of migrants in the European Union".
	I agree with that. The Government's reply to the recommendations is that they do not wish to be seriously out of line with our European partners on these matters, and it is therefore reasonable and helpful to probe a little what the Government's attitude is and how they hope to stay in alignment. In her response to the debate, perhaps the Minister will explain what actions by our partners in respect of these two directives would induce the Government to accept them.
	Since the committee published its report in November, a point not alluded to so far in the debate, the Commission has produced its policy plan on legal migration, with its staging posts. Is the Minister in a position to tell us how the Government seek to work with the Commission to take forward the new proposals published at the end of last year? In particular, can the Minister indicate whether the Government accept the objectives of the proposed general framework directives whose principal purpose is to guarantee a common framework of rights to all third country nationals in legal employment and already admitted to a member state, but not yet entitled to long-term residence status?

The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, I will confine my remarks to the first report on economic migration. I speak in a personal capacity rather than from a considered Church of England view, and I should add that I am speaking not with any claim to particular expertise, but as the jobbing Bishop on duty for the week. I enjoyed reading the report and thought that I would share my response with the House.
	The report and the evidence on which it is based amply demonstrate that migration is a complex and multidimensional issue. It intersects with fundamental questions about what it is to be a nation, as well as with a host of sensitive practical issues at the heart of people's lives. Our participation in the common labour market of the EU, with its principle of Community preference, adds a particular perspective given our historic links with the countries of the Commonwealth.
	There is also the vital, related question of the birth rate in the indigenous population of these islands, and indeed in both the older and newer member states of the EU. In fact the report hardly touches on the subject, although it forms a major background to the policies which are applied to immigration. It is curious how little discussion seems to be taking place in Europe over native birth rates, which are generally well below replacement levels. Without augmentation by immigration we read that the population of Germany, for example, would fall by an astonishing 25 per cent by 2050, with similar trends in Poland, Italy and Spain. Only France among the larger countries would have a balanced population without any further immigration, with Britain a little way behind. In the case of the UK, migration trends suggest that the shortfall will be more than made up by the prospective increase in our population over the period by around 5 million.
	Fundamentally, I welcome the interchange which immigration and emigration represent. The history of this island people is one of trade and cultural interchange, and of enrichment by migration. The Christian perspective underlines this. From the beginning the Church was an international and trans-national movement, and so it has remained. In my diocese we currently have serving as incumbents of parishes a Nigerian priest whose wife is a doctor working in the NHS, a Zimbabwean refugee, and a Solomon Islander from the Pacific where we have a particular link. Each of the parishes in which they minister is flourishing under their leadership. We have had three South African priests in the diocese, and each of them has done a splendid job both in their parishes and in their contribution to wider diocesan life. We also have a German minister whose husband works for AstraZeneca at its UK headquarters near Macclesfield. She has brought a distinctive, much valued and highly effective ministry to her parishes. I hope we shall benefit from further such appointments and exchanges in the future.
	So, from my personal experience, I gladly endorse the broad conclusions of the report concerning the benefits of migration—and yet I remain a little uneasy. Let me try to focus the reasons for my sense of unease in several questions to which I shall invite the Minister to respond in due course.
	First, to pick up on my earlier comment, should we be raising more proactively in our society the issues surrounding the birth rate? Why is it that this is below replacement rate in this country and in so much of Europe? Is it healthy for the future of this country—and even more for the other countries of Europe—that this is the case? One suspects that if recent immigrants were excluded the figures would be even more disturbing. I realise that this was not directly in the remit of the committee, but the report could at least have touched upon these questions more directly, bringing them more to the forefront of future public debate. It is, I believe, a debate which is much needed.
	Secondly, can we leave the future size of the population of this country fundamentally to market forces? Even when Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are included, we are already more densely populated than all the countries of the EU apart from Belgium and the Netherlands. The consequent strains are especially apparent in the south-east region of England, with all the pressures on resources, housing and infrastructure of which we are increasingly aware. There may be answers to these issues—but they are real issues and they need to be considered on their own merits and not simply left to the chance outcomes of fundamental economic and market forces.
	There is much that a market can deliver but there are some large-scale questions which need a measure of long-term planning, not just short-term regulation of market forces. We are learning this in the case of global warming. For a long time, we left energy policies very largely to market forces, with a degree of regulation, and we did not notice certain issues, which emerged only after a long period of time and to which the market itself was relatively blind. Are there similar issues concerning population density and so on in our country? I simply ask the question. They may be difficult questions, but I do not find it persuasive to say that they are impossible questions to consider.
	My third point flows from this. Recent years have seen an extraordinary, almost unprecedented, period of growth in the British and world economies. Presumably this is mainly due to the IT revolution, which has fuelled all kinds of improvements in efficiency and under-girded this extraordinary period of economic growth. It was quite unpredicted 25 years ago. Can we assume that these patterns of growth will simply continue? It seems to me quite likely that sooner or later there will be a recession and, given the long years of growth, quite possibly a sharp and persistent downturn. That is when our migration policies will be truly tested. We should be planning now for these eventualities and not just assuming that there will be the forces of growth to help the situation through.
	The trouble here, of course, is that the growth in extreme political parties—of which we see elements already in our society—will be greatly fuelled by the stresses and strains of a severe rise in unemployment and downward pressures on wage rates from an over-supply of labour. These are serious issues which the report could have dwelt on a little more. Markets have their purpose but also their limitations. Yes, we have been able to staff the NHS through a fairly open market in doctors and nurses, but that should not excuse our failure over the years to train anything like the right number of healthcare professionals in our country. Indeed, we should return to the issue of compensation for often poorer countries which have trained the professionals, both in healthcare and elsewhere, who then come and make their lives and their living in this country.
	In conclusion, let me focus the fundamental question which I sense may arise from this report. Given that migration usually has intrinsic benefits to the migrants and the receiving country—I am not in any sense denying that—are there any limits beyond those set by regulated economic forces? I doubt that the committee is right simply to say that the primary determinant of migration policy should be market forces. They should be our servant and not our master. They should serve wider social, ethical and political judgments, which I consider to be open matters.

The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, who so ably chaired our work and introduced this important debate with great clarity, said that one of our main conclusions was that economic migration is important to the economy of member states and, in particular, to the UK. I totally agree with that and, as a descendent of economic migrants who came here some 1,200 years ago, I would only add that I think my ancestors' arrival here was of extreme benefit to the country.
	The Government's response to the report on economic migration is generally positive. This perhaps is because on the main themes of the report, our views are in harmony. What was less positive—in fact, almost entirely negative—was the reaction of the Home Office to the recommendations we made that it should rethink aspects of its current policy. The UK opt-out from the long-term residents directive was in our view of particular importance. We explained in paragraph 101 of our report that third-country nationals would acquire the right to reside in the territory of any other member state to exercise an economic activity, whether employed or self-employed, to pursue studies or for other purposes. They may then acquire long-term resident status in the second member state when they move there.
	We recommended that the United Kingdom should review its opt-out from this directive and from the family reunification directive. As we said, together they provide an excellent foundation of rights for migrant workers in the EU. The directives do not have any consequences for the Government's position on border controls and would enhance the position of third-country nationals resident in the UK. By way of example, third-country nationals in the UK—for instance, US or Indian nationals who have resided here for five years—will not be able to take advantage of the directive's provisions to move, say, to Paris or Frankfurt. They remain blocked in the United Kingdom. Surely we can all agree that that is neither in their interests nor in the interests of the United Kingdom. Moreover, assimilating the position of long-term third-country nationals' rights to that of migrant citizens of the Union, including by enabling participation in the political life of the country, is a matter of not only improving their living and working conditions but fostering their harmonious integration into society.
	The Government decline to reconsider their opt-out. The reason, it seems, is a fear of not maintaining domestic control over who is admitted to the UK. In general, I have no quarrel with retaining control of our borders. But we are talking about people who have already resided in another member state for at least five years continuously and, more importantly, legally. They make a valuable contribution to the economy of the Union. What have we to fear from giving them the right to come to this country? The Government say that, despite the opt-out, it is not their intention that the UK should be seriously out of line with our European partners. But that, of course, is precisely what it will be.
	The Government's reasons are not in my opinion valid, but at least they are there for us to read. In the case of two other recommendations, not even this can be said. We recommended that the UK should reconsider the case for acceding to the Council of Europe convention on migrant workers, for the reasons given in paragraphs 98 and 99 of the report. The Government decline to do so but give us no reasons why. The least the Minister can do is explain why giving migrant workers the rights in the convention is right for France, Italy, the Netherlands and other countries, which have done so since 1983, but not for the UK.
	The other recommendation relates to the UN convention on the protection of migrant workers. The UK objection to accession is mainly on the alleged cost of housing and social security. All we urged the Government to do was commission research to establish what these costs would actually be. This they declined to do. Will the Minister explain the reason for that? Is the Home Office perhaps afraid that the cost might not be as great as it believes it to be?
	I turn now to our report on the Commission's proposals for a common EU returns policy for illegal migrants. I wish to highlight Article 9 of the draft directive, which we deal with in chapter 5, concerning the re-entry ban. Will the Minister confirm that we are right to question the legal base here? Does she agree that, if there is to be a re-entry ban, a clear distinction must be drawn between those guilty of serious criminal offences for whom it is justified, and those who have simply been in the country illegally—for instance, someone who might have overstayed his or her visa? As the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, reminded us, the problem for Australia is illegal British emigrants overstaying their visa. The two situations I have described are totally different, and the one-policy approach for all is quite inappropriate. Our recommendation in paragraph 138 must be the logical way forward.
	I also draw the House's attention to paragraphs 26 and 28. Do the Government agree that EU instruments should not be made if there is a real question of subsidiarity? Will the Minister look at that point again?
	The draft directive has been roundly condemned by most people, but it is rather novel, in that it requires co-decision with the European Parliament. The Commission and the Parliament are approaching the subject from different standpoints, and many predict that there will therefore be stalemate. The Commission has allocated substantial funds to implement this programme, but Parliament controls the purse strings this time, and has linked the two issues. There is also the need to show that co-decision works, and the Commission will not only want to prove its ability in this new area of lawmaking for it but also produce more legislation on immigration in the future. A failure would be damaging for it. Thus I fear that some directive will be cobbled together, and the result will doubtless be worse than the existing regimes, with a lowering of standards by some member states.
	Once again we stand alone in the EU as the only parliamentary body scrutinising these issues. The quality of our reports has been enhanced by the skill and hard work of our Clerks, staff and special advisers, whom I too thank very much.

Baroness D'Souza: My Lords, I will speak briefly to the second report, which deals with the proposed EU directive for a common returns policy for illegal migrants. Noble Lords have already touched on points I intended to make, but there is one aspect I would like to emphasise; that is, information, or the lack of it.
	The need for information—indeed, the right to it—was a constant theme in our deliberations in committee under the able chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, and with expert guidance from the staff. First, we noted that those in detention in the UK, while often within a humane environment, did not always receive the legal advice and other information they had a right to, which inevitably made their time in detention more bewildering and much more frightening for the children.
	Noble Lords have already spoken against detention for overstaying migrants, but we also accept that, under certain circumstances in relation to some countries, there may well be a need for a period of detention. However, that has to be accompanied by full and free access to information on why they are being detained, what procedures will occur, and what rights the individuals have with regard to appeals, applications for bail and progress of their cases.
	The second area in which information is lacking and there is a gap much criticised by a number of witnesses, including the Chief Inspector of Prisons, is updated statistics on the length of time any one individual or family spends in detention. Reference has been made to the fact that, as things stand in the UK at the moment, while it is possible to have a snapshot of how many people are in detention at any one time, apparently no one can say how long their stays are or have been. If the UK is to contribute to standard setting in developing humane and dignified return policy and practice, there will have to be more transparency on family structure, countries of origin, ages of children and, most importantly, detention period themselves—details, I might add, which are readily available for prisoners.
	The third aspect is to do with the sharing of information on conditions in those countries to which illegal migrants are to be returned and the criteria on what constitutes a safe return environment. Member states need to have rapid access to information on return decisions, removal orders and any re-entry bans imposed by other member states. There appear to be no common standards, nor is there any effective mechanism for sharing such information. For example, one of the witnesses who manages a service organisation returning migrants from EU member states to countries of origin repeatedly told us that each member state makes its own assessments. These clearly differ from one member state to another, which in turn suggests that there are no agreed criteria. The risk here is that overstaying migrants who have committed no criminal offence may be returned to countries in which they will suffer ill treatment—a fate which even convicted prisoners and terrorist suspects are spared.
	The fourth and final area in which there is still need for much more and better information is on the causes and processes of migration itself. Illegal migrants—a term, incidentally, which none of the committee favoured, as has been mentioned—are not seen as people in often desperate need but as spongers, job stealers, abusers of national services and generally bad news. This, as we have heard today, is not the whole truth by any means. If the citizens of EU member states could be made more aware of the kind of difficulties that cause whole families to decamp and face uncertainty, danger, huge financial burdens and debts, humiliation and exploitation, there might be less hostility towards these economically advantageous workers, and therefore less pressure on governments to promote and practise at times brutal deportation procedures.
	The Government have chosen not to opt into the proposed directive—a decision the committee has certainly endorsed. However, the examination of policy and practice among European member states has given us all the opportunity to understand better what constitutes best practice. While the UK is clearly towards the forefront of developing best practice, the recommendations of the committee do not have to wait until a directive is agreed and implemented. They could be put into effect immediately, and this is something we now ask the Government to do.

Lord Parekh: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, for introducing the two reports with wonderful lucidity. I want to concentrate on the first report, which is on migration. I want both to endorse the report and to expand it a little in certain directions which it intimates but does not fully pursue. But before I do that I want to warn the committee about the likely Daily Mail reaction if it got hold of the report. Page 61 contains a wonderful vignette of the Minister being cross-examined and giving evidence. The Minister talks about GATT and the way in which it is likely to impinge on the movement of people. The chairman with, I thought, a tremendous sense of self-effacing humour corrected the Minister and said:
	"This is G-A-T-S. I should say, Minister, I also misunderstood it".
	In other words, it is the General Agreement on Trade and Services. The Minister, like many of us, had talked about GATT when it should have been GATS. I thought that if the Daily Mail got hold of that, it would say that the chairman of the EU Committee on migration did not know until recently what GATT meant and nor did the Minister, and would say that those were the kind of people by whom we are governed. I hope that nothing that I say will alert the Daily Mail and company to the intricacies of the report.
	I want to concentrate on three things. The report rightly talks about immigration in terms of its economic, social and cultural benefits. In much of the discussion the political and cultural aspects of immigration are not fully appreciated. The immigrants are the political and cultural missionaries of this country to theirs. It is not appreciated that the diaspora community or the immigrants play a profoundly transformative role in changing the politics and culture of their own societies—sending back ideas of what they have seen, and taking with them certain ideas and alerting their own governments to how their own policies can be deeply embarrassing.
	It is a wonderful expression of this very House that I should be here raising questions, that the Minister who will answer them is herself an immigrant and that the proceedings of the House are benignly watched over by another immigrant. What greater tribute can there be to this House and to the contribution of immigrants, which is limited not just to economic and social benefits but affects lots of other areas? Precisely because immigration can easily lead either to racist backlash or to legitimate worries, it is increasingly important that it should be taken out of party politics. I have floated this idea on a number of occasions, and it may be worth thinking about; that every year it should be possible for an independent, non-partisan body to produce statistics on the kind of labour shortage that we have, the fair criteria by which we intend to go about meeting that shortage, and reporting what has happened in the course of the year. That would have a profoundly cleansing effect on the race-related politics of our country.
	My next point has to do with the policy that we have followed over the years on immigration. The report rightly highlights that there is a contradiction between the points system towards which the Government are increasingly veering, and the labour market shortage. On the points system, you could bring in a lot of people who might not actually be needed by the labour conditions or, conversely, you could bring in people on the basis of labour market requirements who may not necessarily satisfy the points system. Canadians realised this and increasingly moved in one direction, and the experience of the United States has been no different. It might be worth considering that these two criteria—the labour market shortage and the points system—do not necessarily harmonise.
	There is a profound bias in our immigration system—I also detect it as an undercurrent in this report—in favour of highly skilled migrants, with the result that unskilled migrants generally tend to get a raw deal. While we are right to worry about illegal immigrants, and it is easy to get worked up about them, I suggest that there is also a genuine problem to do with unskilled migrants. When the report talks about £3 billion or £4 billion a year that migrants send back home, I very much urge noble Lords to remember that nearly 75 per cent of that comes not from skilled migrants but from unskilled migrants. They are the people who come from families where money is needed, and they are people who have strong ties of loyalty. That is true not only of what is happening here; it is also true of India as a whole. If you look at the £2 billion or £3 billion that the Government of India receive in foreign remittances, nearly 75 per cent comes from unskilled Indians settled in the Gulf States, not from highly skilled people like myself or my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, or many others. Although we do send money from time to time, it is mainly the unskilled people.
	My next point has to do with the morally uneven transaction that applies in relation to skilled migrants. We keep saying that we do not want skilled people from poor countries or developing countries, yet we keep recruiting them. We have stopped it for doctors, and I will say something about that in a minute, but we keep plundering developing countries for nurses, engineers and IT specialists. The report mentions a moving story of a national hospital in the capital of Botswana, where half the wards have been closed simply because there are no nurses. We do not fully appreciate how much every skilled migrant who comes here subsidises us and how much foreign aid we are getting. I once calculated that there are about 10,000 Indian doctors here and each one, on the statistics produced in this country, saves us £52,000. If you multiply £52,000 by 10,000 doctors, that gives an astronomical figure that runs into hundreds of millions of pounds. I might be told that this is inevitable, and perhaps we compensate for it by giving aid to these countries. The point is that the amount of aid does not even remotely measure up to the amount of aid coming to us in the reverse direction. My basic point is that there is a fundamental moral obligation on our part to do something. The BMA talks about a transfer fee, and other organisations have talked about government-to-government return of money. Whatever measure we adopt, there is a fundamental moral directive that is going to get more acute by the day as with globalisation more and more people migrate to other parts of the world.
	It is also worth bearing in mind that our treatment of skilled migrants has not been entirely fair. Indian doctors, for example, uprooted themselves from India to come here. They spent enormous amounts of money taking the PLAB exam, and we recently told them that they would not be entitled to apply for jobs and would not receive advanced training unless they had work permits—which they will not obtain as long as there are people from within Britain and the European Union qualified to do those jobs. The result is that, of the hundreds of doctors who came here, two have committed suicide, over a dozen have had mental breakdowns and there is an enormous amount of agony and pain. We should have at least had the courtesy to give them six months' notice, or even two or three years' notice, so that they could have started winding up their affairs in a civilised manner.
	Finally, I strongly endorse the report's recommendation that we should opt into the long-term residents' directive and the family reunification directive. That would ensure that migrant workers in this country enjoyed equality of rights with those in the European Union. It is also worth bearing in mind that if a third-country national migrant worker's employment terminates, say, before the expiry of the period for which that person is let in, they should be given at least six months or more to find alternative employment before it is decided whether or not they go back. The Government concede the principle, but they say they would like to make it a matter of discretion. In line with the committee, I suggest that it should be a matter of right.

The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Wright and his colleagues have highlighted two major areas of policy, and migrants everywhere, as well as the rest of us, must be grateful to them for helping to make these important facts more generally known. I congratulate the committee, not just on the timing of the last-minute publication on illegal migrants, but on its contents, because some of its conclusions chime with much that has been said in debates on previous Bills. In particular, I commend paragraphs 100 to 116 on judicial oversight and legal assistance. Can the Minister give us just a little more comfort on this matter than we received from her colleague during consideration of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill?
	For years, the legal agencies which really know about detention have argued for greater judicial oversight and the right to automatic bail hearings. The committee mentions that the Government changed their mind when they repealed Part 3 of the 1999 Act and that they now feel under no obligation even to inform detainees of the possibility of judicial review. Only weeks ago, a few of us were still arguing for that in the latest Bill, but to no avail. I wish that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, was with us today. Now, with the new draft EU directive, I hope that the Home Office will reflect further on this possible breach of the ECHR.
	Remembering the recent media interest in the criminal casework unit and its missing prisoners, and as a patron of the Haslar Visitors Group, I would like to say a word against indefinite detention. My point is illustrated by the case of Mr F, a Ghanaian detainee currently in Harmondsworth, who was sentenced to prison with deportation in August last year; but the Home Office has failed to deport him after three attempts, despite the fact that he is desperate to leave this country. When his sentence ended on 27 February, he was not deported but sent into immigration detention. The travel documents supplied by the Ghana High Commission became out of date; so in March it sent another set, so that he could fly out in early April. A removal date was set, but he was not flown out and those documents also became out of date. Mr F was delighted to be given another removal date of 4 May—last week. He was taken from Haslar Removal Centre to Harmondsworth on 2 May. All seemed to be going well—however, on 4 May, he was not collected.
	That inefficiency is causing a lot of concern to other immigration staff, as well as the detainees concerned. Mr F has now spent a considerable time in immigration detention beyond his criminal sentence. This is at least one prisoner who is not missing. The National Audit Office stated last July that detention costs £200 a day, which means that the unnecessary detention of this one prisoner has cost some £14,000. Haslar visitors have come across four such cases in the past eight months. It must be time to review this policy of indefinite detention.
	Moving on to the first report, the number of migrant workers has dramatically increased according to the IOM. Between 1985 and 2000, the total number of people living outside their country of origin increased from 105 million to 175 million—that is, in only 15 years. This figure includes refugees but not irregular migrants. It represents a 67 per cent increase, compared with a total world population increase of only 26 per cent.
	As the right reverend Prelate and others have said, in the UK the contribution of migrants to our economy has been fully recognised by government but not by the population at large. In the EU 25, deaths will outnumber births in only four years' time, and in 20 years even the present rate of migration will not be enough to make up the difference.
	As we have heard, migrants not only compensate for population decline but provide labour in many areas of our public services where there is a shortfall, and are a net contributor to the economy. The IPPR figure on page 11 of the report of £41 billion in 2003–04 is staggering, representing a 22 per cent increase. Such facts should help to dispel the widespread racism and prejudice that exist against migrants of every kind.
	Inevitably, the most vulnerable categories of migrant are those who fall in with gangs of criminals and get on to Charles Clarke's "disappeared" list, and they will be the ones who feed the prejudice. But the vast majority are stories of success and enterprise, whether in the factory and small business or in schools and laboratories. The figure for Turkey provided by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants was repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan. By contrast, I found the evidence from Migration Watch UK in the report unconvincing as an argument against migration, although it strives for a more reasoned academic position somewhere above the tabloids. But I am not so sure.
	In the field of international development, where I have some experience, migration has long been recognised as a key component of poverty reduction, with migrant remittances often substituting for low agricultural wages or falling income in the poorest regions. As the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, said, it can even become a safety valve for nations in crisis or failed states. I was in Nepal recently, where I learnt that the loss of income from the civil war there and political uncertainty over the past four years would have crippled the country but for remittances from Nepalese workers in the Middle East.
	The issue of the brain drain of doctors and other skilled migrants has been tackled in the report. The illustration from Romania in Question 373 is poignant but it leaves me wondering why so little is being done to promote EU ideas on "circular migration", whereby migrants are eventually encouraged to return home. Compensation schemes in poor countries, such as DfID's projects in Malawi, will always be limited to localised poverty reduction. What is needed is a package from member states that addresses the problem right at the beginning of a contract. More could also be done to encourage the flow of remittances. Such projects could give the EU, alongside the OECD, a much more important role in shaping future migration. But of course it begs the question, fairly raised by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and others, whether the EU has any genuine common migration policy.
	It is the UK's particular problem that it cannot participate in Schengen and therefore neither fully in external borders management nor in the use of biometric travel documents, although it is trying hard to do so. However, I hope that the report encourages the Government to make more progress on other subjects, such as illegal migration, where common ground could be found, and eventually on signing the UN and Council of Europe conventions.
	Finally, I hope that the Government have not forgotten that under an earlier Bill on managed migration they undertook to receive a reasonable number of refugees through the UNHCR, although many fewer than other OECD countries, which take hundreds and thousands. Will the noble Baroness kindly let me know in due course how many have been assisted in this sensible way and also whether the Government have filled the disabled quota, which would assist a small number of mainly skilled migrants who have been refugees?

The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I apologise to your Lordships. I am in a quandary as I have a long-standing engagement with some young people at 8 pm. I beg your Lordships' indulgence of my speaking directly from my script to speed up what I say.
	As a member of Sub-Committee F, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the two reports. The first report stresses the importance of enhancing the legal protection for economic migrants. The second report stresses the importance of Her Majesty's Government to maximise protection for children and families in enforced returns.
	I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, and my noble friend Lord Wright of Richmond about the benefits of economic migration. Indeed, most of your Lordships have commented on that. I echo, too, what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester said. We should make health and social care more attractive to people, and offer staff better support and remuneration so that we can recruit more of our own people in this country to the work. One caveat, to which the right reverend Prelate alluded, was the need to avoid at all costs the use of cheap migrant labour—there is some evidence of this in the United States construction industry—to avoid investing in and training our workforce.
	I am particularly anxious that those of our young people who have been unsuccessful at school should not be permitted to waste their potential without every effort on our part to avoid that. We have a troublingly high number of 16 to 19 year-olds not in education, employment or training. It is widely acknowledged that we have failed to adequately develop the educational courses that might engage many of these young people.
	I was grateful to Margaret Hodge, a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, for her reassurance and evidence on that point. Nevertheless, we need to be vigilant. As the right reverend Prelate pointed out, the current high rates of employment have not been the norm for the past 50 years. The best protection that we can offer our indigenous population at risk of exclusion is strong rights for our migrants—particularly employment rights. That will put indigenous labour and immigrant labour on as equal a footing as possible in the labour market.
	I recognise the profound challenge of housing in many areas. I was gratified to hear Ruth Kelly, the new Minister responsible for housing, saying that social housing would be her first priority. Her Majesty's Government, in working together with local government, need to be highly responsive to addressing any pressure on housing from migrant labour. I hope that the Minister can tell us that the Government are now considering signing up to all the European Union legal instruments to protect migrants. We recommend that in our first report.
	One area where increased economic migration might be of significant benefit to the welfare of our children is childcare. Her Majesty's Government recognise the dearth of experienced level 6 childcare workers to supervise daycare settings. With increasing numbers of under-twos being placed in group daycare, it is vital to ensure quality by good leadership. There is considerable expertise in some of the EU accession states and their neighbours in this area. Will the noble Baroness inquire of her colleagues in the Department for Education and Skills whether a recruitment drive in central and eastern Europe for level 6 qualified childcare workers might be feasible? A brief investigation would be very welcome.
	Our second report regrets the opportunity that the European Union directive misses out on securing high minimum standards across the European Union. I hope to look in some detail at our immigration removal centre at Yarl's Wood. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has already spoken eloquently of conditions there. I want to illustrate the importance of some of our recommendations for the whole of the European Union. On the positive side, we found that Yarl's Wood has improved the training of its custody staff and has introduced Criminal Records Bureau checks. It has appointed a social worker and is reviewing its weight of security measures since the highly critical report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons made shortly after its opening in spring of last year. On our visit, we saw well motivated staff caring for a vulnerable population.
	I was grateful to the Minister's colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, for arranging for me to meet with the children's champion at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Jeremy Oppenheim. I was impressed by his plans to improve Yarl's Wood and the supervision of case managers. I think I can say that, as a committee, we were all impressed by his achievements as director of the National Asylum Support Service when he gave evidence to us. My one concern is that, with great respect to him, he may seek to do too good a job on returns. I ask the Minister to give him clear guidance on the limits his efforts should go to.
	On the other hand, returning to Yarl's Wood, it was lamentable that the authorities did not recognise the need to develop a partnership with the local authority where the converted grade C prison was open for families. If the report of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on Victoria Climbié has told us anything about safeguarding vulnerable children, it is that all agencies must operate together to secure their welfare needs. It is unacceptable that 15 per cent of the children there spend more than three weeks in the centre. On my second visit, in the small group of families I spoke to, one mother had been there for five months, together with her eight and 16 year-old daughters. Another, with a two year-old, had previously spent two months in detention there, and had now spent a further two weeks. The prison-style barred gate in the reception area remains. No wonder a mother asked me what she was to tell her five year-old when she was asked, "What have I done wrong to be placed here?".
	A social worker resigned a couple of weeks ago for personal reasons. On our visit, however, she expressed her concern that the case managers who determine when a family is to be detained were not attending to her concerns that families were being detained unnecessarily. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury—I much regret that he is unable to be with us today and hope that he will shortly return to your Lordships' House—drew our attention to a particularly disturbing case where a mother still breastfeeding her infant had been detained while her child was left in the community. Fortunately, she was released after a few days, after much lobbying from the noble Lord.
	Finally, I quote from the Council of Europe's guidelines 10 and 11 which state that,
	"care should be taken in the design and layout of the premises to avoid, as far as possible, any impression of a 'carceral' environment . . . Staff . . . should be carefully selected and receive appropriate training . . . Children shall only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time".
	I shall write to the Minister with my final comments.

Lord Best: My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, and the members of the sub-committee on both their reports. This kind of sane, balanced and authoritative analysis sheds real light on the controversial issue of migration. If I might presume to offer the committee advice, this report merits a more significant budget for publicity and dissemination so that the media can understand these matters better and the wider public hears more of this wise and informative guidance.
	The Joseph Rowntree Foundation—I declare an interest as its director—has embarked on a substantial research programme on the theme of "immigration and inclusion". We published an important report on 1 May, exploring the employment of migrants from east and central Europe in low-wage occupations: agriculture, construction, hospitality and au pair work. This study was conducted before and after the enlargement of the EU on 1 May 2004 and involved surveys and interviews with well over 1,000 migrants and employers. I will share some of the fascinating findings.
	Employers say that migrant workers are answering their recruitment problems. These employers valued the highly skilled migrant workers who were willing to do low-skilled and low-waged work. They preferred benefiting from what they see as the strong work ethic and reliability of migrant workers, as opposed to employing reluctant UK nationals who some described as lazy. We cannot be sure what impact the employment of EU nationals has on the employment of UK nationals, but several employers said that they had tried to make their jobs more attractive to UK nationals, with little success.
	This research also sheds light on the tricky question of illegal migrant workers. Twenty-two per cent of those surveyed prior to enlargement were illegally resident, mostly because their visas had run out. Three-quarters of student visa holders and more than half the au pairs surveyed were legally resident, but were working more than the 20 hours permitted or were working in non-permitted employment—for example, in bars or restaurants. But almost half the workers illegally resident or violating conditions paid national insurance contributions. Therefore, there are shades of grey in these matters and it seems emotive and inaccurate to describe so many migrant workers as illegals, let alone to treat them harshly.
	Chapter 5 of the EU sub-committee's new report makes several recommendations urging the Government to reconsider ratifying various conventions that would provide a solid floor of rights for migrant workers. The evidence in the Rowntree report supports that call. Although migrant workers knowingly make a trade-off, being willing to do work that many UK nationals will not do because of the economic and other benefits, such as learning English, there is a point at which trade-off become exploitation. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation study cites only a few cases of clear exploitation, but it nevertheless suggests the need to be vigilant about the rights of migrant workers balanced against employers' demands for flexibility in low wage, low-status sectors. Clearly, those who are illegally resident are more vulnerable to exploitation. Most of the A8-country migrants in the study, who were interviewed before and after enlargement, welcomed the increased security and peace of mind stemming from accession rights, as well as the opportunities to change employer and sector of employment. Enhanced rights that protect migrant workers also reduce the hazards of employers turning their backs on training up unskilled young people in the UK, as the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, said.
	More research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is in the pipeline. I hope it will shed light on non-work aspects of migrants' lives. Will A8 and then A10 migrants move into a second phase in which they want to bring over their families, with implications for housing at a time when shortages of affordable homes are a major bone of contention in so many parts of the UK? At present, it seems that the vast majority of A8 migrant workers are here to make money and improve their skills with little thought of living in the UK on a permanent or long-term basis, but if that were to change the implications for housing and other services will need more understanding and management.
	I was rather distressed to see among the excellent press coverage for the new Joseph Rowntree Foundation report an article in the Daily Mail by Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch that dismissed our work on the grounds that my foundation is a
	"long-standing supporter of the immigration industry".
	If the implication is that the researchers are part of some conspiracy to distort the facts to the benefit of the industries that employ migrant workers, I can only say that that is a ludicrous assertion. Perhaps I may instead pay tribute to the work of the researchers involved, who are people of the very highest calibre. They are Dr Bridget Anderson, Dr Martin Ruhs and Sarah Spencer from the ESRC Centre on Migration Policy and Society at the University of Oxford, and Dr Ben Rogaly at the Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex. I commend their work to your Lordships as an important supplement to the two excellent reports from the sub-committee of the noble Lord, Lord Wright.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, some of us remain seasoned commentators on asylum and immigration matters. As I look around the Chamber, I am delighted to see that this debate has included the usual suspects. Many debates on this subject tend to be emotive. Successive legislation since the Immigration Act 1962 has demonstrated that fairness has often been sacrificed in favour of a faster, firmer policy. We seem to be obsessed with the numbers game. I have always believed that migration, whether for economic or security reasons, requires sensitive handling. National and Europe-wide policy should be focused on our moral, economic and legal obligations. It is for these reasons that I welcome the European Union Committee's two reports which are being debated today. We are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, and his committee.
	Whether we like it or not, asylum and immigration issues will not go away. Deeply engraved in people's minds are the wider issues of economic migration and legal and illegal immigration. These are matters of Europe-wide concern. Let us look at the past debates in France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain. Further away, even Australia is not immune. Even countries such as the United States, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Maclennan, are now faced with the debate on the status of migrant workers who cross the frontiers in search of better job opportunities.
	We have to accept that we require international and Europe-wide responses instead of simply a national approach. We must never forget that the poorest countries of the world have accommodated the largest number of migrants and refugees within their borders.
	The underlying principles we need to examine are fairly obvious. We must accept that the present trend of globalisation affects populations as much as it affects trade and environment. Europe, to some extent, has a declining birth rate and lifespans are getting longer—a point so ably made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester. It is no longer a case of who we admit. It is more a question of how we create wealth to pay for pensions and social and welfare services if we have a declining workforce.
	We need to concentrate more on the positive contributions that migrants make when given the opportunity to settle. Let us look at London today. It has probably the most diverse and international workforce in the country. I have never disputed that migration policies must take into account Britain's national interest both economically and socially. Moreover, they must take into account the safety and security of our nation. We must never remain static and will always be forced to respond to changes around us. The economy is no longer national; it is global. That factor alone brings different countries and different nations together. If one adds knowledge-based migration to this, we come to realise that international migration is a central feature of this global system.
	We ought not to forget the huge economic benefits for Britain of cashing in on knowledge-based expertise, including attracting the brightest and best talents. For this reason, if we are to play a constructive role in meeting the huge challenges before us, we need to explore carefully the implications of economic migration to the EU and a common EU returns policy.
	In a way, the points-based system that was recently introduced by the Government has some merit. It may be a starting point in meeting the objectives of attracting migrants who have most to contribute and establishing a transparent application process involving less abuse of the system. There is also a need to exercise caution. In meeting our EU obligations, we should not lose sight of the bigger picture. Commonwealth immigrants have been very successful here, bringing huge economic benefits to Britain. The integration of migrants to British life has been remarkably successful, which is not the case when compared with some of our European neighbours.
	So let me identify two recent issues of concern. I am delighted that the Chinese community in Britain has been quite vociferous in its criticism of recent policy directives from the Government. It is concerned that the qualifying settlement period has been increased, which has affected not only the work permit holders but also their employers. The Government's stated intention is merely a "desire" to keep in line with our European neighbours and therefore there was no benefit in maintaining a four-year settlement period. The danger of retrospective effects here is very considerable. This situation is unfair to those already in this country who have made plans on the reasonable assumption that the qualifying period would not change and it has unnecessarily disadvantaged those skilled immigrants who contribute significantly to this country and our economy. The Home Office has not given sufficient notice of these changes and, if they were justified, they should apply only to those entering the country now and not retrospectively.
	The Chinese community also points out that recent changes do not seem to recognise the effect on businesses. There is no regulatory impact assessment of how the points system would impact on Asian catering businesses here. The second and third generations of youngsters born here have no interest in providing labour in the catering industry. The skilled labour market overseas has filled this gap, but it is likely to be affected by the points system.
	The other aspect, quite ably demonstrated by the problem, is the change in visa rules which effectively bars foreign doctors from completing training in the NHS. That point was ably raised by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Many will be forced to leave the UK during the summer, heavily in debt and with no qualifications. The rule change means that hospitals must give first preference to graduates from within the European economic area. I do not dispute that there is a need for a new system based on the needs of the NHS, but the direct result of the change is unfair on doctors who are already here. This retrospective effect on those who entered this country legally is tantamount to betrayal of those who spent their resources to come here.
	We recognise that overseas doctors have played a vital part in the NHS for many years, making it all the more insensitive to change the rules with no notice. We feel that at the very least the matter should apply only from now on and not to those who have made plans on the reasonable assumption that the conditions under which they entered the UK to train would not change and who are already registered with the General Medical Council.
	I note that the Department of Health has said that it has put transitional arrangements in place for those who have been offered a post starting on or before 4 August, but what about those who are still looking for posts? When we have distilled the recommendations of the EU committee report, one thing stands out—it is to identify a role for the EU in setting standards, particularly as it affects the rights of migrant workers. This is commendable and, as the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association points out,
	"it is necessary to avoid any tendency to regulatory competition between member states in their treatment of the migrant workforce".
	It is estimated that there are nearly 20 million migrant workers in the EU. It is therefore right that we opt into the long-term residence directive and the family reunion directive.
	I am disappointed that the Government have no plans to commission research into the likely costs and consequences of acceding to the UN convention on the protection of migrant workers. Again, that is well reflected in the report of the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Wright.
	I suspect that there will be challenges over the coming year, and I have no doubt that the Government will have to give way at some stage. We share the sentiments expressed by the committee about proposals for a common EU returns policy which is deeply flawed in a number of respects and might result in a lowering of standards currently applicable in the UK. Voluntary return is most effective, manageable and sustainable. We can cite examples of failed applicants coerced into returning. An example was well demonstrated by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about the breast-feeding mother whose child was taken away with the intention of deporting her.
	I resist the temptation to talk about the issues affecting children. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, has already spoken on that and I commend his contribution. The committee should be congratulated on producing this very important report. These reports are the acceptable face of our policy on immigration.

Viscount Bridgeman: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, and his committee on securing this joint debate on the European sub-committees' reports. I thank him as chairman of Sub-Committee F and the other noble Lords on his team for the hard work that they have put in to produce the reports on what has been cited by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, on which we have heard such a distinguished contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Best, as,
	"one of the most contested public policy issues in the UK".
	That statement cannot be better illustrated than by the recent passage of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, to which noble Lords have referred. Indeed, the debate surrounding it touched on many of the issues raised in the reports. The IAN Bill was the fourth such Bill to be presented in three years. It has taken the exposure of the failures of the current system before Her Majesty's Government admitted that the current immigration system was not working; indeed, in their own words it was "complex, subjective and bureaucratic".
	We welcome the new points-based immigration system proposed in the Bill, with the caveats—I am pleased that the Government eventually accepted this—that Parliament can, first, review the points system in three years; secondly, that the Government will undertake an administrative review of applications; and, thirdly, that they will abolish appeals against the refusal of a visa for work and study. That goes at least some way to addressing the concerns addressed by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich.
	During the passage of the Bill in another place, the Minister summarised the current situation regarding immigration and asylum law as a "legislative jigsaw puzzle". Does the Minister agree with me that it is time for consolidating legislation in a move towards increasing transparency for all that it affects? Transparency is indeed one of the keys to creating a firm, fair, controlled immigration system, which is essential not only for good race and community relations but for the orderly provision of public services.
	There can be no doubt that economic migration adds to the economic, cultural and social fabric of today's society and that we could not do without it. As the 14th report highlights, accession workers have filled vacancies in sectors that face labour shortages, in particular hospitality, catering and agriculture. I am sure that the Minister will be aware of the important representations that were received by many Members of the Committee on the IAN Bill from the Chinese and Indian catering communities. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for going into that in some detail.
	As the committee agreed, it is important to manage the migration aspirations of nationals of candidate countries and maintain a balance between the needs and expectations of both employers and workers. In their response, the Government stated at paragraph 114 that they noted the importance of their overseas posts in playing a role in managing expectations. I should be grateful if the Minister could tell us how many of those overseas posts there are and give a rough spread of where they are located. In particular, we are concerned that they should not be cut back along with the embassies and consulates being closed around the world.
	We agree that there are benefits in expanding migration. However, uncontrolled immigration can have the opposite effect, especially when combined with growing illegal immigration and the continued failure of the Government to remove those to whom permits or asylum are refused. I need not remind your Lordships that the number of removals has fallen for five of the past six quarters.
	While I am highlighting the flaws of the current system, I hasten to add that we agree that there is no single EU labour market, so a single framework to regulate access to such a market would not work. There are significant differences between member states, and the effective implementation of a common policy would be difficult to reconcile with national interests. We cannot have a common EU returns policy if there is no common migration policy. I believe that I am at one with the Minister on this point, but I notice the committee's emphasis on the necessity for a common EU returns policy.
	Our position is simple: we wish to retain control of our borders and systems. It is just unfortunate, to say the least, that the government proposals to date do not address the lack of control at our ports and borders. Not until we can secure our borders can we begin to curb the illegal immigration that undermines the current system. We also have concerns that the current system does not do enough to deter the abuse of Immigration Rules. We welcome the sanctions proposed in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill. The exploitation that has developed in some sectors of our economy in recent years is a disgrace, as my noble friend Lord Marlesford and the noble Lord, Lord Best, have mentioned. However, as with much of the recent Home Office legislation, sanctions options were already in place under Section 8 of the 1996 Act but have simply not been used. I hope the Minister will assure me that the Government will put the new sanctions that they have proposed into practice and will demonstrate their effectiveness.
	I want to touch on two other issues raised by the committee and in the debate today. The first is the detention pending removal particularly of children. The 32nd report, published on Tuesday, picks up on points also made by the Save the Children report No Place for a Child: Children in UK immigration detention—Impacts, alternatives and safeguards. All vulnerable groups need special consideration, but children have been shown to be triply at risk of mental and physical health problems and the knock-on disruption of their education and development. I hope the Minister will be able to use her speech to respond to the committee's recommendations regarding children, and that she will comment on her department's assessment of the Save the Children recommendations on the issue.
	The second issue, which is linked to the above, is the failure of the Home Office to keep statistics on the time individuals have been in detention, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wright. This applies particularly to children and in age-disputed cases. For instance, it is currently only a guesstimate that 2,000 children are detained with their families. Following the recent debacle with released prisoners, I can only agree that such a failure is indefensible, and I join other noble Lords in asking what steps the Government are taking to correct this crucial absence of information.
	This debate is set within the context of the tripling of immigration under this Government, which has caused considerable and understandable public concern about the number of people who want to come and live in England. I reiterate that it is vital that we develop a transparent, firm, fair and controlled immigration system. Although we need to secure and maintain control over our own borders, our lack of support for a common EU immigration or returns policy should not necessarily preclude co-operation. Again, my noble friend Lord Marlesford made that point. What plans do the Government have to participate in debates with other members of the EU on immigration and asylum issues? I very much look forward to the Minister's reply.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I add my voice to all those right around the House who have commended the noble Lord, Lord Wright, on securing the debate and on the sterling work that he and his committee have done to bring this to fruition. It has given me considerable pleasure to have the advantage of listening to the debate, because I have enjoyed the really quite extraordinary experience of the Government being applauded all around the House in relation to a matter that involves immigration, Europe and migration, and I shall savour it for a very long time. I hear the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, say that that is unlikely to happen again. I assure him that we shall strive to ensure that this is a regular occurrence.
	It was also right for all those around the House to applaud the contribution made by migrants to this country. I agree with those sentiments. I include, of course, those migrants present in this House: the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, my noble friend Lord Parekh—Professor Parekh—and indeed the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. Although the noble Earl's migration took place a little while ago, it is valuable none the less. I imagine that if every Member of this House examined their history, they would probably discover that they were migrants too. So to all those who have rightly applauded migration we in the Government join our voice.
	That migration has to be viewed against the background that we have experienced right across Europe: joining the EU has given huge benefits to all the countries privileged to join in this enterprise. Looking at Spain, Portugal and Greece, which might at one stage have had a difficulty with migration, now one sees that the reverse is true. They, too, are enjoying the benefits of immigration, which, before they joined the EU, may not have been entirely within their contemplation.
	I am very pleased that the committee's inquiry and report have given rise to such comity in how we and it looked at the issue. Therefore, we were pleased to endorse many of the committee's overall conclusions, particularly that economic migration by third country nationals is important to the economies of the European Union member states; that such migration needs to be regulated in the interests of all parties concerned, a matter echoed around this House; and that, because of the diversity of the labour market needs and requirements, detailed criteria governing it should remain a responsibility of member states. There are many other conclusions in the report with which we wholeheartedly agree.
	As we said in the Government's response to the report, we agree with the committee's conclusions on the free movement of nationals of the new member states. We also share its view that it would be inappropriate to get too far with the new proposals regarding the control of third country nationals entering the EU for the purpose of employment without addressing intra-EU mobility. We agreed with the conclusion that it is not possible to set an overall limit for net migration. We were also pleased to see the committee share the Government's view that national economic considerations should remain the primary determinant of the level of economic migration while taking due account of the interests of other parties. However, we very much take into account what the right reverend Prelate has said: of course, it is not the only factor. There are other obligations in relation to moral and ethical interests. The European Commission has since published its policy plan on legal migration. We are engaging constructively in that. We will continue to do so in the months ahead.
	I particularly welcome the passion with which the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, spoke on these issues. I agree with him about that, although I should say—I am sure that he will not be disappointed—that I do not quite agree with his assessment of my department's approach, not least as one of the greatest departments of state that this country is privileged to have. If we look at the performance overall, even the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, will say that we do not do too bad a job.
	We understand the difficulties and differences of view on the failure to sign or ratify the conventions referred to in this debate. I would say to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, that the United Kingdom is not alone in having difficulties with signing the UN convention. No EU or G8 state has signed or ratified that convention to date. That does not mean that the rights of migrant workers are not considered. Noble Lords will know that migrant workers are already protected in UK law, including the Human Rights Act 1998. The convention would give migrants the same access to public funds and services as British citizens, regardless of their length of stay in the United Kingdom, which would have major cost implications and would undermine our border controls by being an unnecessary pull factor. Similar considerations apply to the Council of Europe convention to which the noble Lord, Lord Wright, and others referred.
	The transitional measures are of course very important, and therefore it is with some pride that we acknowledge that the UK has been at the forefront in Europe in welcoming those from the A8 and A10 countries. We are committed to working with our European partners to achieve an effective, fair and managed system of immigration and asylum. The noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, made it clear that that would be his party's approach too. I also welcome the approach taken by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, that this is the acceptable face of our immigration and asylum policy, so we have a united view on that. We are committed to continuing to work with even greater energy with our European partners to achieve an effective, fair and managed system of immigration and asylum. Co-operation with our European partners helps us to tackle abuse of our asylum system and to combat illegal immigration.
	When one looks at the whole tranche of legislation that we have sought to put together over the past seven to nine years, I hope that the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, accepts that in terms of speed, effectiveness and efficiency, we have made a marked improvement. More remains to be done, but we have moved a significant way forward from where we were. As all noble Lords have emphasised, the United Kingdom has the right to operate frontier controls on people arriving from other EU countries as well as from the rest of the world. That will not change. Where there is a clear benefit to the United Kingdom in participating in individual EU measures, we will do so. That, I think, has been demonstrated by our approach to date. However, we will not participate in any measure which is not in our interests.
	It is right to say that the leadership we have shown is now being emulated by others. My noble friend Lord Dubs began a recitation subsequently taken up by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, in talking about the changes that have taken place in the stance adopted by Finland, Spain, Greece and Portugal, all of which have indicated that they will lift restrictions. France has said that it is not prepared to do so now, but that it will in the future. Two other countries have not yet given any firm indication. However, one can see that this is going in the right direction and our own experience may well influence the experience of our partners, as they see that the disaster they thought would take place has not come about and that the benefits which we are reaping are indeed considerable.
	I know too that much comment has been made about the UK opt-ins. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, made the point. Our policy remains that we will opt in to asylum and immigration measures provided that they are in the national interest and consistent with our policy of retaining frontier controls. In practice, we have opted in to almost all EU asylum and illegal immigration proposals. Not opting in does not mean that we are losing influence on EU asylum and immigration co-operation, as shown during the UK presidency. We continue to take an active role in shaping the agenda: launching the global approach to migration with priority actions focused on Africa and the Mediterranean; securing intergovernmental agreement on common minimum security standards and issuing procedures for ID cards; and influencing the Commission's approach to readmission agreements, having secured agreement on the EU human trafficking action plan under the UK presidency, and now pushing succeeding presidencies to ensure implementation. That vigorous approach will continue and I can reassure the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, that it will also continue in relation to the matters he raised in his speech.
	I should say to noble Lords that the European Commission's policy plan on legal migration, which follows the Commission's Green Paper on the EU approach to managing economic migration, at present has no concrete legislative proposals. The United Kingdom would not be obliged to take part in any legislative measures, as we retain the right to opt in to immigration measures when we believe it is in our interests to do so. This is very much at a formulative stage and I can assure noble Lords—particularly the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, and others—that we will continue to look at the matter with an appropriate degree of care. But, in respect of the common framework of rights for third country nationals, an issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, we would first need to be convinced of the need, taking the view that these rights are a matter for member states. Her Majesty's Government have been concerned also about minimum standards and the potential impact on the UK's public expenditure.
	My noble friend Lord Dubs raised the issue of family removals; this was echoed by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and commented upon by the noble Baroness Lady, D'Souza—all of whom have expressed concerns. Removals are always carried out in the most sensitive way possible, treating those being removed with courtesy and dignity. Depending upon the individual circumstances of each case, we always endeavour to keep families together, but there will inevitably be occasions when this is not possible. Removing people who fail to depart voluntarily is a key part of our work to ensure effective immigration controls.
	I say "voluntarily" because the first attempt must provide people with an opportunity to go in a way which is well managed and consensual. If such people fail and/or refuse to take that opportunity, then, in order to comply with the effective and efficient policy of removal that noble Lords opposite have strongly endorsed, we have to take appropriate steps to make sure that those who no longer have the right to remain actually leave.
	Officers involved in family removals receive thorough training in procedures to minimise the distress caused to a removable family and to ensure that the family is detained for no longer than is absolutely necessary. The Government have made clear that those whose applications for asylum have failed, and who fail to depart from the United Kingdom voluntarily, will be removed when they have no legal right to be here. I hear what the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, says in relation to legal aid and the opportunities made available to them. I can assure him that those matters will be further considered. The noble Earl has rightly assessed and dealt with some of the arguments which have been laid before us as to why the position is as it now is.
	Third country nationals are an important feature of the work that we do. My noble friend Lord Parekh rightly highlighted the issue of the disparity between those who are very educated and may make a contribution, and those who may have lower skills but have made an efficient and effective contribution over many years. I hope noble Lords appreciate that we are not against third country nationals coming to the United Kingdom—for instance, for work or study—and that by opting out of the directive we ask them to qualify under our immigration rules instead. This is sensible and reasonable in that third country nationals can still come to the United Kingdom and yet we can maintain control over our borders. In practice, that usually means that there has to be a firm prospect of study or work for them and that they are not just entering in a speculative way. We think that is a balanced and appropriate way in which to deal with the matter.
	We think that the points-based system referred to by my noble friend Lord Parekh and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, is the fairest and most appropriate system. There does not necessarily need to be a disjunction between the points systems and the labour market; the two can be married well. We think our system enables that to take place. I remind the House that the proposed Skills Advisory Board will have a role in advising government on labour needs. That will be reflected in the points-based system, which it will be possible to review. I understand what my noble friend says about an independent body, but the advisory board has an element that we think could be quite constructive because it would be inclusive, engage others and get the expert advice that would ensure that our points-based system was the best that we could make it.
	I know that the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, and my noble friend Lord Parekh about doctors who have found themselves in difficulties is of real concern. I assure noble Lords that no overseas doctor is having his stay curtailed or being asked to leave the United Kingdom as a result of the changes that we announced. The reality is that they are now likely to have to compete with others for more posts after postgraduate training and, in particular, to obtain work permits. However, that is a consequence of our attracting doctors in the first place and the increase in the number of graduates from our own medical training schools.
	The instances cited are very distressing, whatever the circumstances that have brought them about. If people have taken their own life or become mentally distressed as a result of changes for which they were not prepared, that is a matter of concern. We deplore the extreme and dramatic way in which some groups have chosen to report our changes and which may have falsely given people cause for concern when that concern was not merited. However, the Government cannot undertake never to change immigration rules or guarantee that the rules in force when someone comes to our country will remain the same for all time. The Government must be able to respond to the change in needs and circumstances that are properly conveyed to them.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, we do not object to the rules being changed—that has to be done from time to time—but the retrospective effect is depriving people of the training for which they came to this country. It is fundamentally wrong that the rule should affect people who came here with the intention of training.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, I understand what the noble Lord is saying. There is a chronology regarding when people were notified and what opportunity they were given. There is an issue about whether people fully understood that those changes would take place when they did. One has a certain human response to the situation. Whether or not it was as a result of people's failure to understand, one must appreciate that it has apparently caused difficulty. I can understand why there is concern. Therefore, timing is important, as well as other matters. My understanding—I will correct it if I am not right—is that there was proper notice but people may not have understood the consequences of those changes before they came here, believing that the old system would still operate. I can appreciate that that would be very painful.
	We have a code. We have talked about the top end, but low-skilled legal migration can be one of the better migratory routes out of poverty. That was said by my noble friend Lord Parekh and the noble Earls, Lord Sandwich and Lord Listowel, and we agree with them. The UK understands that there has been concern over the issue. We have a code of conduct for recruitment of the higher skilled health professionals from states with key shortages, such as Nigeria, and will continue to look at those matters.
	There has been a plethora of specific issues that I do not have time to deal with, because my 20 minutes is now up. That demonstrates how powerful the debate has been. I should just like to endorse the work and statements of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I hope that he heard the resounding "Hear, hear" from around the House; the work done by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has been rightly applauded by us all.
	As your Lordships can see from my notes, I could be with you for a long time, but time is up. I shall write to noble Lords on any matter I have failed to answer adequately or at all.

Lord Wright of Richmond: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords and the right reverend Prelate for having taken part in this useful and interesting debate. As chairman of the sub-committee, I shall take some time to digest all the helpful and useful points that have been made. I particularly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, on the skill with which he had clearly trawled through the evidence to find what I suspect is by no means a unique admission of ignorance by the chairman of the sub-committee.
	I thank the Minister for the entirely typical skill and charm with which she has summed up the debate, after what is for her no doubt a typically busy day in the House. We are grateful to her for having summed up. I am delighted to hear that the debate has given her pleasure that she expects to savour for a long time. I will want to study her summing-up tomorrow to discover the extent to which she has been able to deal satisfactorily with the questions that we raised in the debate, and if, as I hope and expect, the points made are positive—we also look forward to the written response of the Home Office to our second debate—I also expect to have pleasure that I shall savour for a long time.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Illegal Migrants (EUC Report)

Lord Wright of Richmond: rose to move, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on illegal migrants: proposals for a common EU returns policy (32nd Report, HL Paper 166).

Lord Wright of Richmond: My Lords, I beg to move.
	Moved, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on illegal migrants: proposals for a common EU returns policy (32nd Report, HL Paper 166).—(Lord Wright of Richmond.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.
	House adjourned at three minutes before eight o'clock.